Washable Workwear Wednesday: Dotted Tweed Blazer

UGH, I have third baby fever. Big time. My husband is on board, and reading the posts about going into labor, newborns, etc. is just making me want another even more.

BUT – I’m really panicked about the reality of a third kid. In most ways, I like the kid phase better (love the newborn phase, don’t necessarily love older babies/young toddlers), but I keep hearing about how hard it is to manage three kids’ activities. We’re also on the cusp of being totally out of the baby phase (3 and 5 year old), and vacations, etc. are starting to get really fun. My two are getting to be really close (but I think they’d love another?) I’m a much more patient mom with older kids, and hate the 9 months to 15 month phase. Ugh, my husband and I joke that sometimes we make life harder for ourselves, and I can’t decide if having another baby is just needlessly complicating a life that is starting to become borderline sane. I also very much want to open my own solo practice, and throwing another baby into the mix would be … insane?

NO idea what I’m looking for here, just enjoying the feeling of calm at home – but aching for one more.

This is probably a stupid question, but how you determine how late in your pregnancy to work? I have 12 weeks of maternity leave and I really want to spend as much of that as possible with my baby, but I don’t want to go into labor at the office. I was more than two weeks late when I was born, and my doc says with that family history + first baby, it’s extremely likely baby will be way late. I definitely don’t want to burn 1/6th of my leave at home with no baby, but do people actually work until they go into labor? What happens if your water breaks when you’re at the office? Even if it happens at home, how do you make arrangements to begin your leave? Do you just email your boss one day and say “yo i’m in labor; not coming in today”?

So glad there is a post today! A long and heavy question to start off the morning (sort of similar to a post on the main site yesterday, hopefully with fewer judgy responses since it’s nicer here on the mom’s site:-)): how do you resolve career goals that cannot be reconciled with those of your spouse?

When my spouse and I got married, our plan was to move to current city for a few years (while he had a temporary job (I’m being deliberately vague here; it is prestigious and related to his grad degree, not like working for a temp agency)) where I would work in big law until I paid off my student loans, and then he would apply for a new job elsewhere after the end of his temporary job and I would leave private practice.

Many years later we are still here. I am now an income partner at my firm. Husband is at a prestigious but dead-end permanent job after his one attempt to get a job elsewhere didn’t pan out. His job is not well-paying but he won’t look for other jobs because he loves what he does. We can only afford to live in the very HCOL area where we live if I stay at a firm. And even if in-house were financially doable, is very hard to do from my practice — I see an in-house opportunity pop up about one a year, never in my city.

My job is literally killing me. Due to the stress, I have fallen back into the very serious eating disorder I suffered from when I was younger. (It was bad. Over 4 years, I spent 1.5 years hospitalized and developed a heart condition.)
I’ve told my spouse repeatedly that I can’t take my job any more and need him to either get a different job here or elsewhere so I can do something else. I can’t sacrifice my health to work at a job I hate so we can live in a place I hate and he loves while he does a job he loves that pays next to nothing. I gave him a long timeline — told him I would stick it out for a year so he had time to find something else — and checked in monthly to see what efforts he was making to find something else. Eight months after I announced the one-year timeline, it is clear he is unwilling to make any efforts to move, either to a new city or to a new job.

If we didn’t have kids, I would just leave. I would rather be divorced than dead. But we have kids (born years ago, before we were supposed to leave our current city). And even if I left my husband so I could live somewhere where I didn’t have to do my current job, I can’t imagine a custody arrangement that allows the kids and I to live a plane flight away from my husband.

I feel so trapped. Part time isn’t an option in my practice group (and I don’t think it would address my issues with my job anyway). Cutting back on expenses wouldn’t make a job change financially feasible — no golden handcuffs here. I have spent tons of time in therapy and have never found it helpful, though I recognize many people do. The only solution I see is for my spouse to acknowledge that the current situation (where he gets everything he wants at great personal cost to me) is unfair and untenable and to start trying to be an equal financial partner (if he wanted to stay in our current city, he easily could quintuple his salary, while still doing the same type of work in a different setting, or he could do the same work in the same setting in cheaper cities for the same pay). What options am I missing?

Not sure if this is a question or a vent. Our kid is in daycare 3 days a week and my husband and I each take a day with him. We like our daycare and currently there are no full time spots available; most of the other day cares that are remotely decent have waits too. I am able to make this schedule work with my job by working extended hours 4 days a week; my husband is a solo practioner and says he is having a hard time. He says it’s getting too hard to have to not schedule meetings for his day and sometimes court requires his presence. Getting work done though isn’t the issue – he has plenty of days when he is done at 4 or 3 and I am also willing to take charge on the weekend if he needs to get work done. We can accommodate the occasional emergency/trial/uncompromising judge with family, but now he wants to just find someone to watch the LO on his day.

I feel very annoyed. On the one hand, I get it – he’s busy at work, business is going well, he has to keep up and this is all good for our family. On the other, I feel like if he had court or something else scheduled on “his day,” he would not think twice about proposing another time to do whatever he needs to do on his day; I feel like he just feels like he is missing work because he is home with the baby.

I guess my question is should I push back in this situation or let it go and just find someone for one day a week? Also, how hard would it be to find a responsible person for just once a week? I’m thinking a college/grad student would probably be perfect for something like this, but not sure if I am not thinking something through.

Curious if anyone else has experienced postpartum anger? I am not sad or crying, I don’t feel depressed, but I fly off the handle at the tiniest things and then I just feel angry and stressed all day. Then I’m upset with myself because it was usually over something so insignificant. It’s like a constant feeling of frustration. I’m 4 months postpartum, not b-feeding, fwiw.

No comment on what happened to the post yesterday?