After the birth of my first child, after week 4, I thought it life was easy. I returned to work part-time when my son was 10 weeks of age. No problem. When my second child was born, I thought it was a lot harder. However, I returned to work part-time when she was 7 weeks old. By the time my third child was born, the kids were easy UNTIL the barrage of homework and activities began. That’s when time became scarce – soccer for child A, T-ball for child B, dancing for child C. That was my exercise time. You could opt to deprive your children of these opportunities…

Balancing two children who are at different stages isn’t twice the work, it’s exponential. You have to remember that Thing 1 is going to be going through a transition as well, and that means more work for you while in your own transition. If you’re lucky and have an “easy” baby, you’ll still be facing something much more than you currently expect. If you’re not lucky – this is the voice of experience via a mother whose second baby had 4 months of colic and sleep problems and would not let me hand her off to anybody – you could find yourself thoroughly derailed and no amount of organization or scheduling is going to help. Seriously. And I am a highly organized woman who runs her own business, by the way, not some whiney loser who can’t sort her way out of a wet paper bag.

The other thing you aren’t taking into account, in my reading of the article in the G&M and your blogs is that toddlers are actually much easier to schedule than school-aged kids. Once you have a couple of kids involved in music and/or sports, it doesn’t just suck up extra time, it fragments it. It’s much more difficult to be productive in fragmented bits and pieces of time – you might have a half hour before you need to head out again, but can you accomplish x, y or z in that amount of time? I often find small things get taken care of where more time and focus dependent tasks – some necessary – are not so easy to accomplish.

I think you need some more life experience before you become a guru able to tell us how to solve our time crunches.

By the way, you deflected the anticipated criticism #1 but did not answer it.

It is revealing to me that you completely ignore the effects of shift work on mothers. The fact is that most working mothers do not work 9-5 or even have a regular shift. It seems to me that you have used your own lifestyle and extrapolated that into a one size fits all perscription for working mothers. It seems to be that you are talking about just one class of working mothers.

What I find most disturbing and highly insulting is the fact that in this article you suggest that a working mother spending quality time with her children is easy. Most working mothers do manage to find quality time to spend with their children but have work very hard at making that happen. Your “magic bullet” solution of shopping once a week is oversimplified and insulting. I am happy that between your cleaning service and online shopping you are able to have enough time to spend with your single child.

If you had approached this topic in the spirit of helping working mothers it would have been less offensive. Your judgemental tone only serves to put people on the defensive. Everyone’s situation is different. Exactly who are you to judge anybody’s domestic circumstances?

Why didn’t you ask the question: Can a man have a career and still spend quailty time with his children? Maybe such a study would take away some of the pressure which you are more than happy to put on working mothers, who “fritter away their spare hours”, and free up more time for all parents regardless of gender.