Reader Lori Croall wrote me a few months ago with a genius idea for Mother’s Day, which is May 14th this year (in the US).

She noted that “Mother’s Day felt like a dilemma to me. People around me wanted to celebrate one way and I had a different idea of how to celebrate.”

[Laura’s note: If mom is having to chase the toddler around the Mother’s Day brunch, it’s not really a relaxing celebration for her.]

Lori reports that “A couple of years ago, I came up with the idea of Mother’s Day (observed). I schedule a day off from work the week after Mother’s Day. On that particular day, I do whatever I want. I usually get up early, get a coffee from Starbucks, and go for a long walk or run in a nearby park. Last year I painted my toes and read a book on my patio.

“It doesn’t really matter what I do, the point is that I get to have a day to myself. I find that I start looking forward to this day every year… It also really takes the pressure off of Mother’s Day, as I know that I have a day that week in which I can do whatever I want.

“I wanted to share this with you so that you could pass it onto other moms as a creative way to really embrace the Mother’s Day holiday!”

I love this idea. If you’ve got some PTO built up, or if you run your own schedule, consider acting like the Postal Service, which will observe a holiday on a Monday if it falls on a Sunday. You can observe Mother’s Day on some other day in May and do what you’d like while the kids are at school or at daycare. Then you can just roll with the experience of whatever the family has planned (or doesn’t have planned) on Sunday. Best of both worlds!

Do you have Mother’s Day plans this year? Has anyone ever brought you breakfast in bed? (Pro tip: Remind the children to bring you your coffee first, and if you have a partner, remind this person to remind the children about that. Then it’s a little less critical how long the breakfast prep turns out to be.)

In other news: Looking for a gift for the ambitious mother or mom-to-be in your life? Check out I Know How She Does It, my book on how real women manage big careers and families with time for fun as well. The Chicago Tribune called it “A refreshingly optimistic take on a topic rarely approached with a sunny outlook: having it all.”

But life is never typical, and there were some good things too. I went to the 15-year-old’s high school choir concert. He looked very handsome in his tux! And the kids sounded good. He and I went to Princeton Reunions over the weekend (he stayed with my parents for the party part and then came with me for the “P-rade” — which he really wanted to go see). And we found out he got into the summer precollege program he was applying to. Summer planning for him has been a source of some stress as another thing had fallen through, but I think this will be a good choice, if going away for several weeks will be a new adventure.

Also, the hammock I asked for as a Mother’s Day gift arrived, and was assembled, and I even got to sit in it for 10 minutes on Sunday (my 12-year-old somehow got to sit in it for a lot longer…but hey). I look forward to hopefully sitting in it some more this summer.

Now, on to the TBT Scorecard! (TBT = Tranquility by Tuesday, my next book, which will be out October 11).

Give yourself a bedtime. Mostly. I was in my bed around 11 p.m. (or within 15 minutes) 6 out of 7 nights. On Friday night Reunions meant I went to bed at 1 a.m. But at least I slept until 8 a.m. the next morning!

Plan on Fridays. Always. This week felt somewhat unproductive so I actually started the planning on Thursday. I wasn’t doing much else. On Friday I also figured out the activity schedule for the week. Since I normally do this Sunday night, this was a change and I think I am a fan, so we’ll add this to the Friday planning list (even if I can’t do certain things like sign up for individual karate classes until Sunday night).

Move by 3 p.m. Hit or miss. I went for pre-3 p.m. walks outside on M, W, Th, and Fr (I had a doctor appointment Tuesday and it threw everything off). I didn’t do anything on Sunday except chase people around. Saturday I did do a ton of walking prior to 3 p.m. due to Reunions (we parked a ways from campus…) so I suppose that counts.

Three times a week is a habit. I only ran twice, although these were more interesting runs than usual. I did a trail run and also ran with the 15-year-old once. Due to my husband’s absence, we only had two full family meals, though I did eat with all the kids a few times. I sang three times (solo practice, choir practice, and church service). I guess technically I played the piano three times, but that was all on Sunday and it was because I took three small chunks of time to play. It only added up to about 30 minutes total, so that’s not really in keeping with the spirit of this rule. However, I have been getting some new music. I had to exchange the 10-year-old’s trumpet (the valves in the rental got stuck right before her concert…) and while I was in the music store I bought sheet music so that is improving my piano game. In case anyone is curious, I can still play a mean Für Elise.

Create a back-up slot. Friday was mostly open as usual. In more productive news, I had some open time on Monday, and was able to fit in a call with a potential speaking client the day they asked, which is always nice to be able to do.

One big adventure, one little adventure. I’ll call my run along the river with my 15-year-old my “little adventure” for the week. I think we will try to do this more regularly over the summer. And Reunions was definitely the big adventure. I saw some people I hadn’t seen in quite a while! And it’s always fun to see the campus again.

Take one night for you. Choir practice fills this spot, though Thursday was the last practice for the season. We’ll see what I choose to fill its place over the summer…

Batch the little things. Unclear. This week felt like a ton of little things. I was trying to work in 20 minute chunks between home-related woes, so there wasn’t a whole lot of batching.

Effortful before effortless. Because my current assignment in the Shakespeare reading projects is Sonnets 80-154, I did use some bits of time to read these (rather than reading a number of them in a 20-minute chunk, as I would with the plays). But at night it was mostly back to the bad habits, I’m afraid. I didn’t have a book I was reading. Maybe my hammock can become my fun. It takes more effort to go outside than to just pop open my phone, but it would be a lot more pleasant…

Anyway, I usually plan out about 4 hours of work to do during these weekend daddy treks. But sometimes they’re gone for 5 or even 6 hours. So I have an uncertain but precious amount of leisure time to fill. What should I do with it?

Yes, yes, I cover this topic in 168 Hours. I know what I’m supposed to do: pull an item from my “bits of joy” list. I should read for pleasure, write in my journal, have some wine and cheese or a latte at Starbucks (depending on the time of day), go shopping, go do strength training at the gym, work on the photo books I like to make, listen to Bach.

But you know what I kept doing yesterday? Picking up the house. This is a rather pointless thing to spend much time on if you have small children. It will just get dirty again. I know this. Yet I am still learning to sit still and read or relax when there are piles of junk and dirty dishes everywhere. Doing housework feels like you’ve done something in your personal life, just as achieving “Inbox Zero” feels like you’ve done something on the work front. There are measurable, quick results – results you can point to as a way to say “Look! I wasn’t frittering away my time!”

Indeed, this is exactly what I did when my husband walked in the door with the kids. I proudly informed him that I had conquered the pile of junk lying next to our bed. “Um, I didn’t think the point of my taking the kids on weekends was so you could do housework,” he said. “Didn’t you write something about that.” Ah, point taken.

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It’s always good to get people talking about what a woman’s work is worth. It’s also a good idea to show that the job description of mom is often a bundle of tasks. I maintain that there really is only one core task: nurturing children’s brains and souls. The other tasks Salary.com is throwing in (most notably, housekeeping) are good candidates for minimizing, ignoring or in some cases outsourcing.

That said, there are problems with these calculations. First, the reason SAHMs earn so much more than working moms is that Salary.com is counting much of their labor as overtime. Indeed, they have SAHMs working 54.4 hours of overtime. When I filled out the form claiming I was a New York based SAHM mom of 2 pre-school aged children, they calculated my workweek as 98.9 hours. When I filled it out as a working mom, they calculated my at-home workweek as 60.5 hours.

If you are working 60.5 hours, you’re obviously not earning as much overtime as you are at 98.9 — if you’re working in the same job. But by calculating it this way, that is, that SAHMs have one job, and working moms have 2 full-time jobs that each have more reasonable hours, you are always going to tilt the calculation toward the SAHM side. If you counted all the work an employed mom does as one block of labor, and figured that almost all the home-side work she’s doing is overtime, she’d be billing $107,802 (time and a half x the $71,868 figure). I think comparing these two numbers — $107k and $117k — is a lot more fair. [Update: the working mom figure already includes a few hours of overtime, though far less than the SAHM figure, so the comparable number is a bit lower than $107k, but not hugely lower].

More importantly, though, those 98.9-hour workweeks are just as unbelievable for most moms as they are for people who claim them in the corporate world. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average married SAHM spends 65.66 hours per week on sleep and personal care, and 15.05 hours per week watching television. Right there we’re up to 80.71 hours. There are 168 hours in a week, so when we subtract, we’re already way under the 98.9 hour mark.

Perhaps people are counting sleep, showering and watching TV as part of their workweek if the kids are in the house, and hence they feel “on,” but this is somewhat hard to defend. If I’m watching the Daily Show with my husband after my kids go to bed, I’m not working. And neither is he. As a housekeeper, day care center teacher, laundry operator, CEO, or any of the other job titles in the Salary.com survey.

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