Maternity Monday: 100% Organic Cotton Gauze Maternity Midi Dress

My husband has been phoning it in at home for a couple of months and may be depressed. I’ve offered several times that he take a few days away with friends, see a doctor, make some changes, etc. I’m getting a little frustrated that he won’t do anything to help the issue (including even acknowledging there is an issue).

Do I keep bothering him about this? Or wait until he’s ready to do something (and keep picking up the slack in the meantime and try not to get resentful)?

talk to me about sleep (yours, not the kiddos). I’m 41, and my sleep has changed so much. Even if I’m tired, I struggle to find sleep. Most sleeping aids make me feel off in the morning. What’s working for you at this stage of life?

Following up on last Friday’s post about preschool director salaries, DS’ preschool is run through a church which makes little to no profit on the school but keeps it open as a public good. They are looking for a new preschool director and posted the job listing with a salary range of $45,000 – $58,000. Though we are in an LCOL/MCOL area that salary range still seems low for similarly-sized high-quality preschools in our area. I pushed the church leadership on it and they said that is the typical salary range for the area based on their research, and they are getting applications from several candidates with experience who are ok with that salary range. The tuition at our preschool is roughly $15,000 per child, which means that the school’s annual budget is $1.5 million, so I guess that is just enough to cover the cost of running the school. If you pay a similar amount for tuition and your preschool director has a lavish lifestyle they are likely, hopefully, not drawing a large salary from the school and probably are living off of wealth inherited or previously acquired, as others have said.

I posted last week about being mentally and physically exhausted from draining my one-bucket PTO on never-ending toddler and family sickness. We got in two days of daycare last week before another virus hit hard on Friday afternoon. I didn’t charge any PTO for it, though, by working late every single night and skipping lunch at the detriment of my own sleep and free time (not to mention house cleanliness). I decided that part of my strategy (including job searching etc.) is going to be to care less about giving work my brain at 30% capacity at 8 pm. I used to think it wasn’t “fair” to bill if I wasn’t going to be mega-productive, but now I’m going to focus on what’s best for me. I’m way too much of a rule-follower to ever pad my billing (I would literally never), but I’m no longer going to stress about taking a longer time than I normally would to finish a document because I’m exhausted. If work doesn’t want my tired output, they can give me equitable time off. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to get my balance up to 4 days of PTO to last me the rest of the year!

My daughter is almost 8, second grade. She’s becoming obsessed with the idea of being an engineer… and I love it? Her birthday is coming up in April. Can you think of any good gifts that she may enjoy? We talk a lot about how everything around us that is not from nature has been engineered – so she has a few “how things work” books/“kid encyclopedias” like this and is obsessed with studying these 2D images of, for example, an airplane and understanding all the components. Last night she went deep on a graphic of a grocery store (of all things ), understanding all the behind the scenes stuff, how the flow of groceries goes from the loading docs to the refrigeration to the aisles – which is not engineering, per se, but the idea of figuring out how things work is really interesting to her.

Trying to figure out what else we could do/sign her up for/gift her. Everything I’m finding is more coding-centric, and maybe that’s the right route. But idk.. any ideas? We’re in greater Boston in case anyone has any geography-specific ideas.

Following up on the post about the moms killed in the Tahoe avalanche, the NYT had an excellent long read about the situation with some preliminary analysis of the factors that led to their deaths (some of you may recall the same paper’s famous Pulitzer-prize winning article on the Tunnel Creek Avalanche – this was similar but not as long or as many graphics). I highly recommend it for any skiers here. Sadly, it’s becoming clearer that the guide company made the fateful decision (without consulting clients) to leave the safety of the hut in white-out, high-danger conditions. Local avalanche experts are saying it all has the classic hallmarks of a “human factor caused” tragedy.