Washable Workwear Wednesday: Ponte Pintucked Pants

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A woman wearing a  Ponte Pintucked PantsI think ponte is my favorite workwear material. It’s comfortable and breathable, and even when it’s low priced it still disguises well as high quality. Usually I’ll find it in a blazer or a dress, but these pants seem to be a real jackpot. They have a lot of elements that I really like in pants — high waist, elastic band (woo!), cropped length, and of course, black. I also am completely in love with pintucked creases. They lengthen the leg and add interest but don’t need ironing. At $168 at Shopbop, these are a little pricier than what I usually allow myself, but for all of the listed reasons, I think I need to own them. Ponte Pintucked Pants A plus-size option is from NYDJ at Zappos. Looking for other washable workwear? See all of our recent recommendations for washable clothes for work, or check out our roundup of the best brands for washable workwear.
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Sales of note for 9.10.24

(See all of the latest workwear sales at Corporette!)

Kid/Family Sales

  • Carter’s – Birthday sale, 40-50% off & extra 20% off select styles
  • Hanna Andersson – Up to 50% off all baby; up to 40% off all Halloween
  • J.Crew Crewcuts Extra 30% off sale styles
  • Old Navy – 40% off everything
  • Target – BOGO 25% off select haircare, up to 25% off floor care items; up to 30% off indoor furniture up to 20% off TVs

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When my kids were little, they were in daycare. We didn’t really do many play dates b/c they spent all week with their “friends.” On weekends, we’d get together with our friends and family, some which had children who’d also come over to play.

Now that my kids are in school, in a public school coming from neighborhoods our kids can’t walk to (our ‘hood seems to be mainly people with much older kids or babies and not much in between), they can’t really meet up with their friends. And many friends go home (to mom or a nanny) after school or stay at the school’s after school program. I am wondering if I am going to be the playdate intermediary . . . forever?

At their age (8 and 9), I was in a dense NE suburban neighborhood where I could roam unsupervised and find tons of neighborhood kids to hang out with (so I was used to not hanging out with my BFFs, any handy kid was OK and going to a BFF’s house was special and likely parent-assisted b/c they never seemed to live conveniently).

So, what works for you? What are good ideas? What can make this a little more organic for the kids and less a just another mommy task?

One thing that works is having friends over for a movie on Friday while the parents stay for wine. We invite the parents we like with kids our kids know (not necessarily BFFs). On Friday we’re too tired for anything else.

Can we talk about light sleeping babies? My youngest (6 mos.) is the lightest sleeper in the world. He will wake up from a bird chirping at the window. He’s okay at night when my older kid is asleep but during daytime when she’s around this means that his naps are 20-45 min. long nine times out of ten. Is this just how he is? Will he grow out of it? We have a white noise machine and try to put him to sleep in the back bedroom where it’s quitest but would love any other tips.

I’m sure some of you wise ladies have been here and can provide advice. I have a close friend who had her first baby within a month of me having my first. We’ve been talking a lot since we got pregnant and in some ways she’s been a great source of support. But she’s so…competitive is the word, I guess? I hear a lot about how her baby is hitting every single milestone early and why isn’t my baby doing X yet and aren’t I worried etc. My baby doesn’t seem behind on anything significant (and her pediatrician has expressed zero concerns) but talking to this friend makes me feel really badly about my baby’s development and my parenting. I have tried changing the subject but lately it feels like every conversation is just her bragging about her baby doing everything under the sun. Any advice? It’s getting to the point where I feel like I have to distance myself for my own sanity, but that bums me out, especially because I don’t have many mom friends.

Just needing some words of encouragement this morning. I’m 6 months pregnant and feeling miserable already. My weight has really been skyrocketing the past month, despite eating the same. I’m getting pretty gnarly stretch marks already, and my whole body hurts. I can’t sleep and the heat is killing me, especially commuting on the subway. Two of my four work-appropriate maternity dresses just shrunk in the wash, so it’s only Wednesday and I’m repeating outfits. I just waddled to my desk feeling like I crawled out of a swamp.

Trying to exercise, do prenatal yoga, stay super hydrated. But I just feel a mess. Is it true some women have mega growth spurts in the second trimester and then slow down in the third? I don’t see how I can continue to grow at this rate. How are there still three months of this?

No advice but just want to say I am in the same place with a similar friend whose kid is a month older than mine. We’ve slow faded but I still see a lot of stuff on Facebook that makes me roll my eyes. They were bragging about reading chapter books to him at three months and they put him in a convertible carseat just after a year (for a small-to-average sized toddler).

I generally don’t like slogan-y maternity t-shirts (please slap me if I ever refer to myself as a “preggersaurus”) but I just found one on Asos that says “GIVE ME YOUR SEAT” in huge letters and I’m kind of mad I didn’t get it in time for this weekend’s long bus trip. :P

My daughter is almost 2.5 and recently she wants carried/picked up all the time. I’m 8 months pregnant so it’s hard to do and I know I shouldn’t baby her but if I say no she has a total melt down. She looks so pathetic and sad standing there crying with her arms up and I feel so bad saying no. Any ideas why she is acting like this all the sudden and what I can do to stop it? I’m worried she is in for a rude awakening when baby comes.

My spouse and I are trying to decide if we want to try to have a kid. One thing that I’m nervous about is that I can foresee us having different parenting styles based on how we were both raised and how we both treat our cat currently (for example, I can envision him being more lenient on rules and wanting to spoil the kid more, whereas I think I’ll likely be more strict on maintaining schedules/rules and want the kids to understand they can’t have everything they want and that’s okay).

Are there any websites, books, or other resources we could check out together that would help us have productive conversations about what we envision our parenting style to be and how to bridge differences (if it turns out we do have different ways of approaching parenting)? In short, how did you approach this conversation with your partner? Any advice?

Or, am I overthinking this? Is a lot of parenting determined by the kid’s demeanor, such that trying to coordinate on parenting styles now is not helpful? Thanks!

Long time lurker, first time poster. Excited to be joining this community, as I’m currently pregnant with my first.

Question: have any of you adopted a no screen time policy at home with your kids? Not talking about limited screen time, but no screen time (exceptions would be made for Skype calls with grandparents, as I view that differently). DH and I would like to do this, e both grew up watching a lot of TV as a kid and found it pretty pointless, and I’m strongly swayed by spending time with my nieces, who literally cannot sit in a restaurant without a phone or Ipad. I have mentioned this idea to some mom friends IRL, who get very defensive about their use of a screen (and some of the comments yesterday on the screen thread echoed some of the comments I have heard IRL). So I don’t ask such questions anymore, and thought I might try to get some feedback here.

Is this just a pipe dream or is this possible? And for anyone who has done this, how old are your kids? I see it being pretty easy with very young kids, less so with older children.

Looking for advice, especially from those of you who leave near your parents or in-laws: How often do you see you them?

My mom is feeling neglected and not entirely unjustly but I’m not sure what kind of expectations to set. Weekdays are a blur of wake up, get kid ready, drop off at daycare, go to work, pick up kid, go home, eat dinner, play for 30-60 minutes, bedtime routine for her, unwind for an hour, bedtime routine for me. Weekends are our chance to do what we want and my mom grates on my nerves enough that I don’t want to promise her a certain amount of that precious free time. Furthermore, my dad (they’re divorced) lives with us and while she’s doing her best to be amicable, she gripes about him to me and I have very little patience for it.

But at the same time, she’s not a terrible person either. She’s retired and doesn’t have a solid grasp of time–she’ll think it’s been three weeks since she’s seen us when it’s actually just been one, etc. And she calls or Facebook messages often enough that I don’t have a lot of opportunities to initiate contact, more often just reply. I’ve tried explaining that we’re not ignoring her, just busy, but I’m beginning to feel like I’m gaslighting her.

Help.

I have to confess one of my biggest mom insecurities: I can’t cook. I can boil water to make pasta and can throw a few things in the slow cooker to make chili, but beyond that, my cooking skills are pretty limited and my attempts at learning haven’t yielded the best or most edible results. It’s just one of those things that I don’t seem to have a knack for, and as a working mom, I don’t have much time to devote to learning at this point in my life (neither does my husband, unfortunately).

It doesn’t usually bother me but I’m realizing that my 7-month old is going to start eating more “real food” soon (we’ve been feeding her jarred purees), and I’m panicking a little bit. I want her to develop good eating habits and I want her to eat good, healthy food, yet I feel unprepared to provide her with that due to my limited cooking abilities. When we’re eating at home, my husband and I usually survive of prepared salads with some protein thrown in, pasta, and the occasional organic frozen pizza/TJ’s entree.

Does anyone have any advice? Are there any other “can’t cook” moms out there? How do you handle feeding your kids?

Looking for recs for work appropriate maternity clothes for shorter ladies. For context, when not pregnant, I almost always wear petite clothing and am about 5″2. Last time around, I ended up shortening a few dress, but they never looked exactly “right.” Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks!

My husband and I both have relatively “big” jobs, and we have a 10 month old, 3 year old, and 5 year old. I am a income partner in Big Law, and so, I cannot easily take a day (or even a morning) off without having to make up the hours another time- particularly given that I returned from maternity leave at the beginning of the year and had to ramp up. (Also, my husband decided to get another advanced degree, and so, I was solo parenting a lot during the first half of the year while trying to come back from maternity leave, which did not help the billable hour situation.)

From June until the end of August, we will have had various company staying at our house for over 30 days- all my husband’s friends and family. In addition, my husband’s department has an annual BBQ that was foisted upon us last minute (for the second year in a row) where we have between 35 and 50 people at our house. The BBQ was two weeks ago, and I ended up doing the majority of planning and shopping- because he was tired. I did 100% of the clean-up.

As an aside, my husband determined that we should buy a lake house get-away, and we bought a fixer upper in November that we have now largely rehabbed. I agreed to making this purchase, but this is not “my thing”. The lake house is not relaxing for me at all because it is difficult to deal with the busy 10 month old there- as compared to our larger and safer house in the city where I can take him for walks easily and go to the park. My husband has shown that he would like to go there every weekend where it is remotely possible- even if only for a few hours. I told him after this past weekend that it is not relaxing for me to go there and watch our three kids as he deals with projects.

The next round of company comes next Wednesday, and I had suggested getting a babysitter for a large portion of Saturday to just unwind and to not have the kids in tow. (I feel as though all I do is work, childcare, and entertain folks in my home, and I am exhausted.) I had offered a few suggestions of things that we could do… including just life maintenance items and even going up to the lake for the day without kids. My husband has just refused to indicate whether he would be interested in this.

This morning I pressed him on the topic, and he indicated that he did not want to get a sitter unless we had plans, which we do not. I told him that was fine, but I am not going to the lake this weekend with the little guy. Then, I said that if he planned to go with the older kids that he should let me know because I might still get a sitter for a couple of hours so that I could go catch-up on work. He totally snapped at me and told me that I was being negative and punitive. I told him that since he has refused to plan anything that I wanted to make it clear as to what I would not want to do this weekend.

We rarely fight. And, I feel a little blind-sided by this. I am just so tired. I had a difficult pregnancy, and I basically went for over a year without sleeping through the night. I just wanted a day off. I fully understand that I am very lucky to have the resources to potentially hire someone to give me a day off. But I did not think that this was a controversial request to have one day where I was not completely beholden to work and children (or guests).

I do not really need advice. I just needed a place to vent. I feel tired and sad, and I needed to just tell someone. Anonymous internet strangers seemed like the easiest place to vent, because I love my husband and my life. I just need a break.

Please help with my crazy 3 year old. We are having major issues at night with him right now. He will fight going to bed and will scream at us at the top of his lungs trying to get our attention. He takes off his diaper; stands at the gate at his door yelling “something’s wrong with me;” asks for hugs; asks for us to rub his back; says he had a bad dream when he wasn’t actually sleeping; lies and says he lost his favorite stuffed animal; etc.

He also will do this in the middle of the night, sometimes for up to 2 hours at a time. We have a gate across his door so he can’t leave and we ended up taking the light bulbs out of his overhead light last night so he can’t turn his light all the way on (he has a nightlight). We go to him and try to soothe whatever is bothering him, but then it turns into him literally clinging to us and preventing us from leaving. I’ve tried laying down with him — he says “bye bye” after a few minutes, I leave, and then he freaks out all over again. We’ve tried being stern with him; we’ve tried letting him cry it out. Nothing seems to work.

There’s a lot of change going on right now, so we think it’s a transition thing — new room at daycare; 5 month old baby sister; potty training. But we simply don’t know how to deal with it. And we’re EXHAUSTED. When he starts screaming he wakes up the baby, who already still nurses twice a night. And we can’t switch off, because when he’s yelling it’s impossible for one of us to sleep.

Has anyone dealt with this before? Is this “normal,” or does this rise to the level of getting a doctor/therapist involved?

We just found out that our nanny who has been with us for 4 years — since my oldest was 4 months — has breast cancer. It’s at least stage 2 but we are waiting on further tests for more precise diagnosis and a treatment plan.

I love her like a family member and I’m devastated. I’ve been crying on and off at work the last two days. I thought about telling my colleagues, but I’m worried they won’t understand since she’s not a family member.

Our nanny seems to be in a state of shock (understandably) and really worried about how she will handle treatment. Her husband has Alzheimer’s on top of everything. We know she will need surgery, chemo, and radiation, but no idea how long treatment will take.

I want to let her know that we are there for her and will support her through this. I’d love for her to return to work after her treatment, but I don’t want to pressure her to make plans or commitments before she is ready. Advice on how to handle the situation? I’m having a hard time facing the prospect of searching for a replacement. We love her so much and hoped she would stay with our family for many years to come.