A Week in the Life of Working Moms: A Series from CorporetteMoms.com

Working moms share a week in their lives, including work-life balance tips from a wide variety of careers. These are ALL of the installments of our very popular interview series, "Week in the Life of a Working Mom," in which we talk to various moms from across the US in various walks of life about their childcare, work-life balance, mom hacks, and more. Some easy tags if you're looking for something particular -- click these links to take you to the interviews with these particular features:

Childcare

nanny • au pair • SAHD • daycare • preschool • grandparents

Mom's Career

lawyer • doctor • project manager • executive/manager • other

About the Kids

only child • two kids • 3+ kids • toddler • elementary school • teen • athlete

Where Mom Lives & Works

Midwest • Southern US • West • Northeast

Mom's Lifestyle

travels often • work from home often

Picture via Shutterstock / Photographee.eu.

Presenting: More Tags for Our “Week In the Life” Series!

09/14/2017 by Kat 14 Comments

Something I’ve been meaning to do since starting our popular “Week in the Life of a Working Mom” series is to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. So to that end, we’ve started adding more detailed tags to the posts, and we’ve got a much better category page. That way, if you want to read about, say, working moms with kids in daycare, you can easily find all of those posts. (We’re hoping to create something far superior to simply searching for “daycare,” which would bring up our regular advice posts on daycare, all posts in which we’ve used the word daycare, and comment threads containing the words daycare.)

When you click through to Week in the Life, you’ll see all the tags laid out…

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Admin, Week in the Life of a Working Mom Tagged With: posts

A Week in the Life of a Working Mom: Finance at a Fortune 500 Company

08/24/2017 by Guest Poster 37 Comments

For this week’s installment of our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series, I’m happy to introduce CorporetteMoms reader R, who lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and two young children and works in finance for a Fortune 500 company. Our usual caveat applies: Please remember that this is is a real person who has feelings and isn’t gaining anything from this, unlike your usual friendly (soul-deadened, thick-skinned, coldhearted, money-grubbing) blogger — so please be kind with any comments. Thank you! – Kat

If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise), please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here.

First, Some Basics About This Working Mom…

Name: R
Lives: Chicago suburbs
Job: Finance
Age: 36
Home Situation: Typical suburban 2,500-square-foot house with my husband (airline pilot), kids (daughter, age 4; and son, age 1.5), and 60-lb. dog.
Childcare Situation: Daycare, $600/week

Stock photo credit: Shutterstock / sirtravelalot.

A Week in the Life of a Working Mom: Communications Exec in D.C.

08/10/2017 by Guest Poster 9 Comments

For this week’s installment of our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series, I’m happy to introduce CorporetteMoms reader Emily, who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a communications executive with a one-year-old daughter. Our usual caveat applies: Please remember that this is is a real person who has feelings and isn’t gaining anything from this, unlike your usual friendly (soul-deadened, thick-skinned, coldhearted, money-grubbing) blogger — so please be kind with any comments. Thank you! – Kat

If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise), please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here.

First, Some Basics about this Working Mom…

Name: Emily
Lives: In Capitol Hill, works in downtown D.C.
Job: Communications executive at a global corporation
Age: 35
Home Situation: I live in a 2,000-square-foot, 3-bedroom rowhouse with my husband (41-year-old public affairs professional) and our one-year-old daughter.
Childcare Situation: Nanny share, 45 hours per week. Our nanny makes $23 an hour for 40 hours per week, and $34.50 per hour for anything over 40 hours. Her guaranteed weekly gross is $1,092.50. We split this with the other family in our share evenly, so we pay a little more than $500 a week.

A Week in the Life of a Working Mom: Part-Time, Work-at-Home Attorney

07/27/2017 by Guest Poster 36 Comments

For this week’s installment of our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series, I’m happy to introduce CorporetteMoms reader Mindy B., who lives in a suburb of Detroit and is a work-at-home attorney mom with a teenage daughter. Our usual caveat applies: Please remember that this is is a real person who has feelings and isn’t gaining anything from this, unlike your usual friendly (soul-deadened, thick-skinned, cold-hearted, money-grubbing) blogger — so please be kind with any comments. Thank you! – Kat

If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise), please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here.

First, Some Basics about this Working Mom…

Name: Mindy B.
Lives: A Detroit suburb
Job: Work at home (part time) for a boutique law firm
Age: 49
Home Situation: I live in a Tudor home in a community-oriented small town with my husband who travels frequently for work, our 14-year-old daughter who’s in all honors classes (plus band) in 8th grade and swims competitively 20+ hours per week, and two 2-year-old CRAZY pups.
Childcare Situation: Because I work from home, I only need babysitters when we will be out past the time our daughter goes to sleep (i.e., theater, etc.) but I do need “chauffeurs” to drive our daughter to/from activities when I have afternoon or evening commitments and my husband is traveling/working late.

Mindy pointed out how her schedule may be different from other Week in the Life moms we feature:

(1) we only have one child (I have NO idea how parents juggle more than one child!), (2) she’s more responsible than most adults I know, and (3) my husband’s office is an hour away from home and he also travels out of town 1–2 nights a week, 2–3 weeks per month.

A Week in the Life of a Working Mom: Land Services Agent in Kentucky

07/13/2017 by Guest Poster 15 Comments

For this week’s installment of our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series, I’m happy to introduce CorporetteMoms reader Autumn, a working mom in Kentucky. She works as a land services agent for a public utilities company and is 37 years old with one child. Our usual caveat applies: Please remember that this is is a real person who has feelings and isn’t gaining anything from this, unlike your usual friendly (soul-deadened, thick-skinned, cold-hearted, money-grubbing) blogger — so please be kind with any comments. Thank you! – Kat

If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise), please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here.

First, Some Basics about this Working Mom…

Name: Autumn
Lives: Kentucky
Job: Land services agent for a public utilities company
Age: 37
Home Situation: I live in a 2500-square-foot home with my husband, who works in IT, and our 3-year-old daughter. We have four bedrooms; one is used as a playroom for our daughter and one is for my husband’s office/man-cave. We’ve lived in this house for almost seven years and we are slowly trying to declutter and renovate.
Childcare Situation: My daughter goes to preschool 8:30-4:30 Monday through Friday ($180/week). Every now and then I keep her home with me just for fun.

Last Week in My Life

A Week in the Life of a Working Mom: A Midwestern Lawyer Mom with Four Kids

06/22/2017 by Guest Poster 28 Comments

For the sixth installment of our Week in the Life of a Working Mom series, I’m happy to introduce CorporetteMoms reader Elizabeth. She’s a 42-year-old consultant/ lawyer mom to four kids; she lives in the Midwest. Our usual caveat applies: Please remember that this is is a real person who has feelings and isn’t gaining anything from this, unlike your usual friendly (soul-deadened, thick-skinned, cold-hearted, money-grubbing) blogger — so please be kind with any comments. Thank you! – Kat

If you’d like to be featured (anonymously or otherwise), please fill out this form! You can see all posts in this series here. You can also sort by tag, such as “daycare,” “au pair,” and “lawyer mom.” (We’re working on devising a system that makes sense.)

First, Some Basics about this Working Mom…

Name: Elizabeth
Lives: Midwest
Job: consultant/attorney — I lead annual strategic planning efforts for hospital clients, as well as hospital mergers.
Age: 42
Home Situation:

My husband is family medicine physician who covers inpatients at the hospital every third weekend. We have four school-age children: A, 13-year-old son; E, 10-year-old daughter; B & D, 7-year-old twin sons. We live in a 4000-square-foot house in the suburbs.

Childcare Situation: $18,000/year.

We have had Au Pairs for the past four years. The last two have been males. Prior to that we covered childcare with a number of options: a preschool teacher/nanny, a college student that lived in during the summer, hubby took Mondays off and I took Fridays off. We love the Au Pair help. My spouse and I have schedules that change from week to week, depending on his inpatient load and my travel. Having an Au Pair has eliminated the hours of stress and scrambling with multiple care providers to try to cover different hours we needed. For instance, the preschool teacher was a wonderful caregiver but had a family of her own so was unavailable to help in the evenings or weekends. Fortunately, we have a supportive family network nearby that was able to assist in some of those previous pinches. But it is nice now to have that family come to support the kids’ extracurricular activities or have special one-on-one time with the children, rather than serve in the role of an emergency babysitter.

Our Au Pairs transition about every year or so. We have appreciated the ease of picking a new care provider to sync up with the evolving needs of our children. For instance, our first Au Pair was a nurturing female who was excellent with our toddler twins. Or more recent Au Pairs have been active males who play sports and make up fun games to play. I expect in a few years we will be interested in a caregiver that can provide more homework support.