I attended a short course at work once that really shifted the way I thought about development and productivity. Up until that point whenever I had an appraisal with my manager there was always a few points that he/she would point out where I had done well and a few where I could have done better. Invariably the focus for…
Category: Life lessons
Reward charts, because they’re worth it!
We used a reward chart for the first time with Miss Z when we started potting training her. We weren’t sure she would understand the concept or whether it would have the desired effect, but we gave it a go anyway. The chart had several actions like sitting on the potty, pulling down her panties, actually doing something on the…
Baby on board…
Before I was ever pregnant I utterly lacked any sensibility for pregnant women and how the daily commute might be difficult for them. Once I became one of “them”, then I certainly could relate. Especially in those first 3 months of pregnancy when I was feeling extremely nauseous, but there was no visible signs of pregnancy. It was also too…
Do you have work/life balance?
I attended a Career Development day for women at my work the other day. There were about 100 women in a room, all from different parts of the company, and from different countries/backgrounds. There was a group of five women at our table. It was a very interactive day, with lots of discussions around issues and strategies to help women…
Privacy or Paranoia…
“It’s not the same as it was in the old days”. You, like me, probably heard this growing up time and time again. What you probably didn’t expect is that you would be thinking it, if not saying it, now that you have kids. I was born in the seventies. There were no devices and the TV was black and…
Can we really have it all?
My parents both worked. I don’t think of them as having been career driven, it was just the reality I grew up in. All my friends’ parents worked too. I grew up in Portugal at a time where the country had just risen from a political revolution (the Carnation revolution), was a mainly agricultural country, not much infrastructure existed –…
The day we go from invincible to helpless
My sister has two kids. They’re teenagers now. When they were little, and I was a care-free soul with no children, I remember a day when we were all at the beach. A hot sunny day. I asked my sister to go swim with me and off we went. The sea had some waves, but was suitably calm for us…
Disappointment is part of life
Before the Christmas break, we got a letter from Miss Z’s teacher about an upcoming school trip to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was going to happen at the end of January. I told Miss Z that as I worked really close to St. Paul’s I would go meet her there to give her a kiss and a hug. For more…
Expectations and assumptions… the Mother of all f*** ups
Pardon my French, but I couldn’t find a better title. You probably know what I’m talking about. We go through our lives having expectations of people and making assumptions about people. And generally that ends is disaster. We are supposedly adults. We grew up, we found partners, we have jobs, we found a place to live, we had kids, we…
Meal times should be fun, for you!
By now you may be thinking that I’m a database of rules and regulations. It may be so, but I think that rules and boundaries are essential to having well-adjusted kids. My husband’s Aunt once told me that as her kids grew so did their level of freedom and responsibility. Meaning they had no freedom and no responsibilities as littlelings,…