Considering how hard I work, one would think that on a day off, I would spend the time relaxing at home with my daughter. I find that my days out with my daughter last about as long as the school day.  I have always been a social person, and usually schedule to meet up with one or more friends on my days off. After thinking back upon my days off over the past year, I admit that I spend about one hour per day alone at home with my daughter. A typical day would be:

Breakfast and dressing 8:00-8:45

Gym 9-11 (my daughter is in the gym child-watch)

Chiropractor 11:30-12:15

Lunch with a friend 12:20-1:45

Play-date with neighbor and her three kids 2:00-3:45

Home working or cleaning while my teenage neighbor entertains daughter 4-5:30

Sushi dinner with hubby 6:30-7:30 (my daughter is with her grandparents) 

If my husband is home alone with my daughter, they might leave the house to get the mail, but that is probably the extent of their travels.  We go out as a family, but I am the more frequent “public parent”. As an extrovert, I am energized by being with others. My daughter has picked up my attitude and has already made some nice friends during the twenty months that she has been in town.  She met twin boys who are only one week older than her at the local Whole Foods, and we usually play with them and their sister for a few hours at least once per week. All of this socializing can take a toll on the state of my home, or lack of housekeeping.  I am sometimes tripping over toys, clothes and dishes, which is why I usually have a middle school age parent helper over for two hours every week so that I can attack some of the piles of debris without having to worry about my daughter being bored or upset.  My pediatrician says that I can confine my daughter without worrying about her crying for up to an hour, but as a working mom, I cannot bear to hear my tot in distress.  I use the shower at my gym on the six days of the week that my daughter and I go there because I don’t like hearing her cry, or cleaning my bathroom very much.  Some of the pre-school age children who frequent the child-watch at our gym cry because they are only exposed to one caretaker, usually a parent. At the gym child watch, my daughter automatically seeks out any babies or tots in distress. She is always ready with a hug and a pat on the back. I tend to thank my parents for the way I behave in my posts.  They both inspired me to be a competitive runner.  I mostly thank my father for making me into an extrovert. I am not a believer in in-born personality traits.  As an only child, my father would remind me, especially on beach vacations that if I didn’t make any friends soon, I wouldn’t have anyone to play with.  He would point to the other children who seemed to be close to my age, and insist that I introduce myself. Sometimes I was very nervous. “She seems so much older than me,” I would sometimes say to my father, or “She has brothers and sisters to play with”.  My dad never accepted this reluctance, so I always had to at the very least try to make a new friend.  To this day,  I know that I was not born this way, but I have developed a knack for meeting new friends, and I have my father to thank for my tendency to seek connections with others. It’s funny, when I ask familiar people how they are they usually tell me something personal about their lives instead of just saying the stock, “fine”.  I know that most people probably don’t have the time to speak to the person who pours their coffee (hopefully into a re-useable mug like mine) about what they are studying in graduate school, or who watches their kids when they are at work… As a working mother, I probably don’t have time to have these conversations either, and I sometimes sidetrack people from their work. I wonder how other working moms spend their days off?