If you are a working parent, is your company family-friendly? Take a minute to think about what you think family-friendly really means--in your ideal world (we're not talking reality, here). You can make a list, as I make my students often do in class, whenever I want to challenge them to think about a topic. Some things I would put on my list would be:

1. Good affordable health care benefits for families (including dental and vision)
2. Flexible work time
3. Extended leave for pregnancy/illness
4. Ability to bring children to work on school breaks

Back when L. was just a baby, Scott and I coined the word "tag-team parenting"--well, maybe we weren't the first to coin it, but we certainly felt like pioneers in that make-it-up-as-you-go territory. I distinctly remember the first time the phrase popped into my head. I had parked our old Dodge Grand Caravan at the Hardy's parking lot opposite the bus stop where the free university shuttle dropped off and picked up. I was nursing--or trying to nurse--an unhappy L. who was bundled into layers of onesies and a sweater (it was October and COLD).

Yesterday was a little crazy, all of it--the whole day. At the end of it I couldn't find much I wanted to write about because most of what I would have written about seemed whiny and self-pitying, or included rants about health insurance claims, playground injustices, the weather, and kids who spill hot chocolate on your favorite green pants. Sometimes all these petty and not-so-petty things add up inside your head, like an overflowing storage bin, and you just want to break out the rubber gloves and a gigantic vacuum and do some major housecleaning before you truly lose your mind.

I feel as though my last two posts have been extra long-winded, and weightier-than-usual--but it's an emotional week when your littlest one turns five--emotional in wonderful and wistful ways, too. So I thought today I'd put up something short and sweet. Classes start this morning, and the rest of the week will be a whirlwind of activity--work and home and party-planning, with a potentially unpleasant 7:30 a.m. IEP meeting thrown in on Friday, for good measure.

I couldn't get a column up yesterday because it was, frankly, One of Those Days. You know those ones, where you fully intend to get x, y, and z done, but maybe only z gets done, or x and y, but not all three, and certainly not in the order you wanted. One thing I didn't really realize about parenting when I was a younger, more naive parent, is how much mental energy it takes. When you are the parent of a young baby, or even a toddler, you find it physically exhausting. I used to think it was mentally exhausting as well, but I really didn't know what mental exhaustion was back then.