Our Treetop Quest Review

Planning these playdates for review has proven to be a bit more challenging. While we love an easy afternoon at the splash pad or hanging out at our homes, this is an OT-forward blog and we love new experiences.

I was especially hyped for this playdate at Treetop Quest in Gwinnett, GA.

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Child(ish) Reads: Podcast Playlist Summer ’23

It’s the last week of school in Fulton County and we are very excited to take our annual June blog break. We hope you are looking forward to a fun summer as well. So while you are making your to-do lists and packing your sunscreen, load these new podcast episodes up on your phone and give them a listen.

Yes, these are all parenting episodes, but all of my other listening has been #Scandoval and plant care. I’m in it deep, guys…

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Team Parenting

In Tuesday’s post, I compared parenting to a job. In this post, I want to talk about how you and your partner function as a team to raise your kids and run a household. There are a lot of different versions of team parenting, mostly the concept of including grandparents, teachers, babysitters, other caregivers, and coaches as your kid’s “team” to help support their development. TEAM is also an acronym in our Hunt, Gather, Parent review. But for this post, I am exclusively talking about the primary parents/guardians and we’re keeping on our career goggles.

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Coffee Chat: Parenting as a Job

In March, I went through a job transition. To figure out my next career move, I weighed the options with Troy; should I find another full-time job? Do I need a full-time job? Do I pivot to a different industry? Is it necessary for me to stay-at-home?

In my job search, I looked for the following: competitive salary and vacation time, hybrid scheduling but mainly work from home, travel is a plus, retirement matching, and hourly flexibility to accommodate for my family’s schedule. If I was getting really picky, I’d go for summer Fridays and complimentary meals like at Google. Honestly, I was looking for perks that let me be as available as I could with my girls while still giving me a salary, exciting responsibilities, and time to myself.

They always say that being a parent is the hardest and best job there is, so I wondered what it would be like to be a stay-at-home during my compulsive LinkedIn browsing. It’s estimated that the average SAH parent does the equivalent of three jobs, and if paid to scale, would make over $100K per year. Working parents are at their salaried jobs for 40+ hours/week, and then come home to “the second shift”. Yes, everyone’s family is different and how they manage their lives and raise their children is completely personal. But what would happen if we started applying our job search standards to parenting?

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Our Renaissance Faire Review

It’s time for another playdate review. This month, we chose the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Both Mary and I have gone to RenFaires in the past and we each took our children last year. But for this year and this blog series, we decided to make it a full-on playdate.

Same review rules apply: The playdates need to be something new that the kids have never done before. In this case, it was a full day out with another kid. True, our kids have been to this location before, but this is not a family trip. Subtle difference there. Also, the faire had more involved activities than the standard meet-up-at-the-park and had multiple applications of sensory/development function.

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