25 Hours A Day

Carri is constantly battling being a full time working mom AND trying to be the world’s greatest mom.  She tries to counteract her time behind a computer by spending her evenings and weekends in the garden with her family.  Carri’s personal blog, Read Between the Limes, is half about gardening, and half about having fun with her 5 year old daughter. She can often be found, net in hand, chasing butterflies in her front yard.

Cesar is the father of two boys and step father to three more, ranging from 18 to 3 years old.  He works in the IT field, lives with his fiance in a very rural part of Frederick County and commutes to Washington DC daily.

Ellen and Stanley are parents of two ‘thirty-somethings’ and are new first-time grandparents. They are the in-laws of another blogger here (Michelle) and hope to share different views about some of the same stuff.  Ellen works as a preschool specialist, so she still spends lots of time with 2-5 year olds.  Stanley teaches at a university in Boston, mostly 18 year old freshman, so he, too, has contact with those who are ‘less well formed’ at that point in their life! They are both very new to being grandparents..having only heard many stories, some good, some bad,  from friends who have already graduated to grandparenthood.  Learning how to be a grandparent is yet another adventure in parenting, which just comes upon you suddenly without any real preparation.  Ellen and Stanley plan to take lots of deep breathes as they try to figure this out along the way.

Joanne is a stay at home mom who somehow managed to talk her husband into having four kids in sixteen months. Trying to do the math? That would be one set of triplets and then their little brother who came along less than a year and a half later. An infertility survivor, Joanne chronicles her unpredictable and often humorous life with four under four on her personal blog, Life with Triplets Plus One. When she’s not busy carting her kids around in her swagger wagon or dealing with the abundance of bodily fluids produced by four young children, she loves to run, read, and daydream of the day when the only shoes she will have to tie are her own.

Katie is mom to Holton, wife to West, and RN to too many wonderful patients to count. She work full time as a mom and has an additional full time job as a bone marrow transplant coordinator, because let’s be honest even working moms are full time moms. Katie’s life is crazy hectic, her house is never clean, they cook rarely, but their home is full of love (and dog hair).

Matt has four kids at home and 4,000 at work. He shares the house with that gal Joanne (see two paragraphs up) and works in higher education, where he conducts research for a new book tentatively titled, “Bud Light and Bibs: An Examination of the Behavioral Similarities Between Toddlers and College Students.” Having four kids under four will do strange things to a man – for some strange reason Matt now finds himself daydreaming of cooking and baking projects to try out with the kids. A former college athlete (ok – not an athlete, a swimmer), Matt now satisfies his competitive spirit by training to load and buckle four kids in a minivan in under 45 seconds.

Michelle is a baby mama, a dog mama, and a wife all while being a proud control freak.  You can imagine how her world was rocked when she couldn’t get pregnant exactly as she had planned; luckily IVF did the trick.  As a new mom, Michelle is determined to figure out the balance between becoming Super Mom and not driving herself crazy…and if that is humanly possible. When she’s not working as a media specialist or writing for her personal food blog, eatniks.com, she is either cooking or letting her daughter confirm what she always suspected was true: she’s the funniest person in the world and an incredible singer (although no one else agrees with her baby on that).   Like many moms, Michelle is searching for the answer to important questions like, “when is it ok to give an infant pie?”

Naomi is a Jewish, 30-something working mom from Charlotte, North Carolina.  Please don’t mistake her for the girl with the sweet southern charm because you won’t find it here.  She tells it like it is and if you come to her with a problem, she’ll give you her opinion, whether you ask her for it or not (comes with Jewish Mother territory).  Naomi has a full-time job accompanied with a “fuller” time home life that’s left her striving to find a harmonious balance, if it even exists.  She’s learning everything about this thing called parenthood as she goes and has learned some incredibly valuable lessons thus far.  Naomi is absolutely in love with her family and looking forward to more of this amazing ride.  Here’s the line-up… Daughter-Isabella, aka, Ella who’s 3 years old; Husband-Jeff; 2 dogs-Laney and Shana (their first “children”); 1 cat-Bandit.

Rachel is a reading teacher and mother of two (ages 2 1/2 and almost 5) who is still trying to find balance between working full time with her “school kids” and working full time with kids she brought into this world.  Wanting to be involved in her children’s schooling as much as possible, she has found herself volunteering to be room parent at her daughter’s preschool (does she really think she has time for that?) while also searching her son’s school calendar for volunteer opportunities which don’t require her to take off from work.  Weaved throughout all of this is her desire to launch a family literacy program and get her students’ parents involved with their own children’s education.  Oh, and did we mention the organized mess that is her house?