The pressures on moms to be perfect is just amazing. It doesn’t matter what you do, someone will say you’re doing it disastrously wrong. Maybe that’s why it’s such a habit for many moms to gloss over the problems they deal with and try to show a public face of being a really happy mom who can calmly cope with anything life and her kids throw at her.

Even tantrums and finding time for a shower.

I’ll admit some days are easier than others to be a stay at home mom. Keeping my sanity the day after the baby has cut a tooth and was up all night can get interesting. Especially if my feet find the LEGOS on the floor too early in the morning.

There are two key things for moms to remember. Number one is don’t try to be perfect. You aren’t. You don’t want to be.

Number two is to ignore all the people who criticize your little imperfections. They’re not as bad as some people say they are. It’s really not going to make your kids fat and lazy if you sometimes give in and let them have fast food or watch an excess of television.

There’s this little thing called moderation that really means you can get away with so much more than you thought possible. Moderation is a great thing to remind yourself of when you’re feeling bad about your parenting skills. When you’re letting the kids do things that other parents would tell you are unhealthy, will lead to bad habits, whatever, just remember that many things that should not be done habitually are just fine in moderation.

If that doesn’t cover it, try remembering to not sweat the small stuff. Lots of things can be called small stuff if you think far enough ahead.

Never, ever, feel bad for saying you need a break from your kids. You may have this goal of being the perfect stay at home mom who loves every minute, but you need your breaks. We all do. That’s why people who work outside the home get regular 15 minute breaks and a lunch break.

Breaks are a chance to clear your head and relax a little. They’re a bit harder to get for stay at home moms, but you can take breaks and you deserve them.

Get out a little in the evenings or weekends without the kids and without running errands. Do your own thing for just a little while.

Needing time for yourself doesn’t make you a bad mother. Taking time for yourself  can help you to be a better one, in fact.

And if you make a mistake with your kids, don’t be afraid to admit to it. We all make mistakes. You’re a better example for your children if they see that you can not only make mistakes but admit to them.

Forget perfection. Stop trying to be the mom who follows all the rules in whatever parenting style you prefer. Just do the best you can, be yourself and enjoy the ride.

One of the troubles with being a stay at home mom is that you don’t earn any money for what you’re doing. If you need an income while you stay at home you have to find a work at home job or a home business to start, and that takes away from your time being a mom. That’s not a bad thing, just that you’ll have more things to balance in your life.

But just because you aren’t earning money doesn’t mean that you aren’t getting something in return.

No, I don’t mean frustration, although parenthood in general brings frustration with it quite often. It’s not an easy job, no matter whether you work outside the home or stay at home and focus entirely on what your family needs. Most kids are far from being perfect angels all the time.

In many ways the pay a stay at home mom gets is the same one all mothers get – the love and affection their children can bestow. The stay at home mom is just a bit luckier in that she has more time for it to happen.

It can’t be taxed. It can’t be spent. But you can save those earnings in your heart.

The love you earn from your family is what helps you get through the hard times, when the children aren’t listening, when you feel unappreciated, when things just aren’t going right. A quick hug and a kiss can make a lot of problems fade away. The problems may come back, but you’ll have a reminder of why it’s all worth it.

That doesn’t mean that staying at home isn’t an adjustment from working. It is. The kind of feedback you get is entirely different.

In either case people will probably feel freer to tell you that you’ve messed up than you’ve done a great job, though!

Teach yourself to see the feedback you get as a stay at home mom and teach your family to give it. If you want your children to show you gratitude, show it to them and tell them when they need to express it. If you want affection, give affection. Children are amazing mimics, so the more positive things you show them, the more you will get in return.

It’s both frustrating and fascinating. Frustrating because you will see all your little bad habits being echoed. Fascinating because you’ll see all the good too. If you want to earn the most affection from your kids, show them lots of it. It’ll pay you back most times.

And yes, there are times when kids try to hide what they feel. They go through phases where showing their parents affection is an awkward thing. But just watch them and you’ll know you still matter.

Being a stay at home mom, whether you work at home or have the raising your family as your only job is hard. A lot of people really won’t show you much appreciation, and there’s always someone to criticize your decision.

The same can be said for moms who work outside the home, of course.

Being told that your kids would be just fine if you put them in daycare is tough to hear, of course, and isn’t always true. So much depends on the quality of daycare that is available to you.

So what difference can you make to your family as a stay at home mom?

Money

The money issue can go both ways. Yes, many families have to cut back due to having just one income. It’s a big risk. You’re also likely limiting your retirement income if you aren’t working and saving for your retirement while you’re home with the kids.

On the other hand, daycare can be miserably expensive. Sometimes, by the time you take out the cost of daycare, the cost of commuting, cost of wardrobe, taxes and so forth, you’re actually saving money by not having a second income.

Which way your being at home impacts your family’s finances really depends on your likely income potential. If you know you’d be losing money by working outside the home, those naysayers have nothing to complain about!

There’s a risk to being a single income family, of course. That’s if layoffs come about. Losing one income is painful no matter whether one or both parents work, but if it’s the only income the situation may be a lot worse.

That’s a part of why I always recommend stay at home moms consider some form of working at home. It can be a job or a home business, but have some way to bring in a little money. Save it for retirement if you don’t really need it at the moment. But keep those skills up while doing something you love when you’re at home. You may not need to work now, but there are no guarantees for the future.

Your Relationship with Your Children

How you relate to your children can be different depending on whether you’re home all day with them or gone at a job. Either one can cause problems or make things better, depending on personal needs and personalities.

A mother who doesn’t want to stay at home, for example, probably shouldn’t. A miserable stay at home mom is going to have a harder time doing her best for her family.

What really matters is that you have ways to be there for your children when they need you. That goes for both mothers and fathers, regardless of where and if they work.

And of course some children need their parents more. This is especially true for younger children, although the option isn’t always there if the mother’s income is needed. As always, doing the best you can is generally good enough for your family. Perfection isn’t required.

Sad to say, an overprotective stay at home mom who never lets her kids do anything is going to cause as many problems for the working outside the home mom who is never there for her kids. Both are extremes; your typical stay at home mom isn’t excessively overprotective and your typical working outside the home mom will do everything she can to be there for her kids.

More Time for Activities

Stay at home moms do have a big advantage over working moms in being able to sign their kids up for whatever activities they’re interested in. It’s just easier to get them to the activities, whether it be sports, an art class, whatever.

Working moms can do it, but they have to be pickier about schedules.

Housekeeping

Yes, we all have to handle it. Working moms have more limited time for housekeeping, but stay at home moms have messes generated all day in their homes. Either way it can really add up.

In both cases, get the kids involved at age appropriate levels. Little kids love to help; older kids need to know how to do housework for their own good later in life as well as just having responsibilities now.

Don’t Let the Guilt Get You Down

All moms feel guilt. It’s just one of those things. No matter what we do there’s someone there to tell us we’re doing it wrong.

That’s okay. Remember that your own parents weren’t perfect. Hopefully their worst mistakes were forgivable and already forgiven. Do your best and your kids will hopefully do the same for you.

I’ll be the first to admit it. Sometimes having a family makes it really hard to succeed, especially with small children in the equation. I’ve had to slow down this year quite a bit more than I liked because my youngest is quite the demanding baby. Taking care of her needs, the needs of my other children, spending time with my husband and even sometimes pretending to keep a clean house takes a way a lot of my possible working time.

And yet they’re also the reason I do all of this.

I talk to my older kids a lot about why I do what I do, and especially why I’m sometimes very busy. It’s not always something they want to hear, but they need to know it even when they don’t understand.

But when things are really getting rough it’s wonderful to remember why I keep up the fight to have a successful home business, rather than work outside the home and pay hideous amounts of money out for daycare.

Sure they make it harder. That’s a part of having a family. But such a wonderful obstacle.

I don’t like to call it overcoming an obstacle when it comes to dealing with my family’s needs. Somehow that just feels wrong. It’s really more learning how to work with the obstacle and succeed with it right there.

Ideally having fun with it whenever possible.

That’s why I carry a notebook in my purse, for example. I can be out and about and still have a way to write down ideas.

Some of the things that eat up my time I do my best to use in productive ways. My son has speech therapy once a week. Since I don’t have to sit in the class and it’s an hour long, I use the time to run errands. It’s nice to not have my errands eating into time I could be using in other ways, and for strictly local errands the amount of time is just about perfect. That changes the time it takes to get him to and from therapy from unproductive time to well used time most weeks.

Family can also be inspiring. I wouldn’t be writing this post if I weren’t thinking of them as I write it.

Family also gives me that extra push to really work hard. Just thinking about how much having a commute would take away from the time I can have with my family (shudder)! They may be demanding of my time at times, but what better way to be?

And of course much of it all is about trying to give my family the lifestyle I want us to have. Nothing fancy, just three vacation homes, a 10,000 square foot home, a yacht, eight winning lottery tickets, adoring fans… wait, wrong dream.

Seriously, while there’s the home ownership dream and the wish for a more comfortable lifestyle, it’s not all about the money or the things. It’s also about being able to be there for my family. Having them may make it more challenging to reach my goals, but they also mean that reaching for my goals as well as achieving them is more satisfactory.

You can’t forget that part. Even when you’re trying to work and the kids want your immediate attention and the baby’s pounding away on the keyboard while you try to type, you cannot forget that you’re trying to succeed for them.

Reading the news about Somer Thompson’s death drives me a little nuts. It’s not so much the coverage; such a death is rare enough that the media tends to go wild with coverage on it. The scare tactics they use on parents along with it are somewhat annoying, of course.

But what drives me most nuts are the comments people are aiming at her mother, criticizing her for working outside the home. Like there’s much of a choice for a single mom. We can’t all work at home, even when we want to.

These critics of the mother have this attitude that the mother’s place is in the home.

A mother’s place is not in the home. A mother’s place is where she can do the best job for her family.

For single moms, that most often means working outside the home. That’s also often true for married moms. Being at home with the kids, whether we have a job or a business or are home for the kids, is a luxury we can’t all manage.

I also do not believe she was foolish for letting her children walk home from school. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was walking home without parents much younger than that. Most children who walk home from school, even without parents or other children will be just fine.

No, the world is not a safe place. More children die in car accidents than from abductions every year. Children even get abducted from their own homes with their parents at home. It’s tragic, but not every tragedy can be prevented. It’s called life!

My heart aches for her entire family. It’s a nightmare that no family should have to live through. Let’s save the blame for the one who killed her, not the people who loved her.

Like many people, my big reason for starting to work at home in the first place was to be there for my kids. With three of them now, that reason only gets more important.

But I have to admit, dealing with a baby when I want to get work done is not easy. It’s been really tough lately to come up with enough hours to get even the minimum amount of work done I’d like to. Especially as she gets older, more mobile and more demanding.

Time was when I could sit her on my lap and still get a little bit done. That’s not quite so simple now. She’s bigger and much more interested in my keyboard and anything she can reach on my desk. Especially if it can go in her mouth.

Yeah. I pretty much need her naptimes to get anything done. And it’s still not easy many days then, as she’s not exactly a champion of sleeping through the night. Thank goodness I don’t have to drive to work that tired.

This is one of the times that it takes incredible dedication to keep going. Believe me, it would be much easier to just take off, but that’s not what I’m going to do, and if you’re in a similar situation, not what I’d recommend either.

When daytime naptimes don’t work for me, working at night after all the kids are in bed can. Other work at home parents prefer early, early mornings, a thought which gives me the chills. Really, really not for me!

But you do what works for you.

Work early in the morning. Late at night. During baby’s nap. When there’s another adult available to watch the kids.

You can even hire a “Mother’s (or Father’s) Helper” to just play with the baby as you work. I did this when I was a medical transcriptionist, and it was pretty helpful. You don’t even need your helper able to feed the baby or change diapers. Just play with the baby and let you know when something more is needed. Older siblings (where available) can also help.

I like to remind myself that this won’t last forever. That means enjoying this time with a baby and not letting it get me down too much just for being tired. And if the price for not losing a post to a baby pounding a keyboard is a little less sleep, so be it.

Moving is hard on children, especially when they’re leaving their friends. It’s been interesting with this move seeing how each of my kids reacts.

My oldest is the most upset. She has the most friends, after all. She finally broke down the other night, crying, and talked about her concerns.

Fortunately, she quickly got to the point where she realized that she might just love our new home. If my husband can get a transfer back to the San Diego area when he’s qualified in a year, we might just do that, and she realized that she would probably be sad to leave her new friends.

My son is insisting that he’s not sad about it, but is decidedly fussier right now. Pretty typical stressed out four year old kind of behaviors.

And of course the baby just knows that she wants Mommy’s attention. She’s too young to know more than that I’m busier than usual and don’t play as much as she’d like.

For the older two, we’ve been talking to them a lot about why we’re moving and what they can expect. It really helped my oldest when we told her about all the kids we saw in the neighborhood just driving around.  Definitely a nice young neighborhood, which will help.

We’re also driving her nuts by giving her just about any detail about the house except whether it’s one or two story. She badly wants a two story home, so we’re keeping that as a surprise for her. It makes her mad, but should make her first sight of the new home very exciting.

We’re lucky to have local, retired grandparents to take the kids. I’m trying to have them gone most of this week, as we have a lot of stuff packed up. They really hate being told “sorry, that toy has been packed already.” Much better for them to be having fun with grandparents than to be underfoot all day.

They have helped with some of the packing, plus some toy sorting for things that they’re willing to get rid of. It’s a great time for getting rid of at least some of the excess toys!

Letting the kids be involved can slow things down tremendously, but it also helps them. It’s not just something that Mommy and Daddy are doing. It’s something the family is doing together.

Here goes. I get to be the sole parent in charge all day. My husband is off at his new job and I get to do it all even more so than usual.

Some ways, it’s not so different from other times. It’s been a while since I’ve consistently been the only one to put the kids to bed, and my oldest in particular is rather emotional about not having Daddy home for a few days. My son says he’s not going to be sad about it, but we’ll see. That’s easy to say at first, after all.

And we’ll see how much the baby notices. They do, after all. If nothing else, there will be cues for her with how everyone else is acting.

But I’m used to being the one in charge all day, so that part isn’t going to be so difficult. I’m planning lots of play time for my kids with their friends that we will be moving away from. Trying to get what work of my own done that I can. Trying to find a home to move into up there.

And sleep. I know there’s time to sleep in there.

Really.

Despite the baby’s best attempts to keep me up some nights.

Sometimes I do my best work when things get crazy in my life. There’s just no time to goof off, and I know it. If I work at things, this might just be a help rather than a complete hindrance.

Kids will catch you off guard sometimes. We were at the store the other day buying toothpaste, when my oldest daughter grabs a pack of colorful flossers off the shelf and starts begging me to buy them.

She’s begging me to buy dental floss? Are you kidding me?

Of course I bought them. I’m not sure someone didn’t switch kids on me for a minute there, though.

These are the Dentek flossers, and they’re… adequate. My kids really haven’t had trouble with them, and it’s nice seeing them want to brush their teeth. I don’t like them for myself, though. They loosen up too easily.

It’s fun seeing them debating which color to use, rather than putting up a fuss over having to floss.

There are some other really nice looking kid’s flossers over on Amazon I think I’ll check out when these run out, though. I want to keep encouraging such a healthy habit.

With school being almost out around here, I’m getting told by my kids’ teachers about the work they need to get done over the summer. It’s understandable… I mean, I know that kids forget a lot over summer vacation. But how much do I really want to push them?

I like thinking back to my own summer vacations as a kid, which were pretty leisurely. My school didn’t even give summer reading lists.

My daughter has about 3 pages of recommendations for what she should be doing over the summer to get ready for second grade. My son has a big packet from his speech therapist, which really isn’t quite the same in my view, as most of it is games to play to help him speak better, which is a real issue for him and something that needs to get better, ideally before he hits kindergarten.

And so I’m thinking on how much of this stuff I really feel like doing.

My own preference is to primarily make the tools available and encourage their use. I did tell my daughter that yes, she will be reading during the summer. She had been trying to say that she’d just do that every other summer. Kids!

I don’t really think she’ll try to not read all summer. She enjoys it too much.

Honestly, at this age I’d rather let them lead the way during the summer. We have plenty of workbooks and I’ll encourage their use, but that’s really all it takes most of the time around here.

So what’s your plan? Does your child’s school recommend or require summer homework?