Back to work today…those first sleepless nights when your baby arrives pass so slowly, and then you blink and it’s three months later. Coincidentally we are ready to launch the Cribsters.com website just as our own Cribster starts daycare.

My son is starting middle school in the fall, my good friend’s youngest child leaves for college in August, my colleague’s husband just quit his job to join his wife’s firm, my 46 year-old childhood friend just learned he’s going to be a new father and my professional path (not so much what I do, but “how” I do it) is up for review.

My family and I just got back from a road trip.  We made the nearly 5-hour trek from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was a bridesmaid in my cousin’s wedding.  Prior to the trip, I gathered all the necessities I needed to keep my 2 ½ year-old and 4-year-old from having a meltdown mid-ride.  DVD Player, check.

My husband brought home dinner last night, and to my utter amazement, I opened his dessert pan and found a burnt cookie staring me in the face.  My chocolate chip cookie was perfect, but his peanut butter cookie, which wasn’t a tad overcooked or a little charred on the edges, was scorched, incinerated, burnt almost to a crisp.  If you don’t believe me, just look at the cookie, commonly known as a Pizookie, in the photo above.

Recently I was ask by a major publication a few questions about family balance. As most mom's there is really not a time that I sit down and ponder how to balance. It just kind of organically happens.  As I answered the reporters questions, I realized that I had been working on our Summer Balance plan for a few months. Just now our summer schedule was coming together and that is good since summer is almost here!  

Here is an exerpt from the interview questions of some ideas my Summer Balance "Plan":

I recently saw Honda's new commercial for their new CRV in which a spritely young lass travels the country, taking photos in a different t-shirt in every state she visits, crossing off states one at a time from her "leap list." Being the curious cat that I am, I had to Google leap list to find out more...and loved what I found!

Most work travel isn't glamorous or fun despite what non-work travelers think. You commute by planes, trains and automobiles and sometimes all three and then check in, go to meetings day and night and crash before doing it all again the next day or traveling back home. Prior to having a child, it was easy to do this, come home, eat take out, sleep in and recover, and sometimes, even spend an extra day traveling as a tourist when visiting a new city.

This whole Merida makeover thing has me a little upset. I do not see what the big deal is if Disney feels like changing her appearence. They created her, they can change her. It is my job, as my daughter's mother, to teach her confidence in her appearance and the difference between what the media perceives verses our real lives. I set the example for my daughter. I am in control of what she watches or does not watch. I am raising her, not Disney, not the school. It is up to me to show her by example how a woman should look, dress and present herself.

Last Friday evening I became aware I was allowing someone I was working with to have too much say over how I was feeling. I was giving this relationship–a relatively new one–too much weight, too much power. And I didn’t like how this was making me feel: rushed, speeded up and unsettled.