My family’s dog, Riley, died recently. He had kidney failure, and was gone in less than a week. My father, a writer, told us we should be writing about our feelings and memories. Here’s what I wrote…
“The dog I’ve grown to know and love Is now in heaven up above.
In his heaven there’s squirrels and trees. He runs through the yard with an easy breeze.
There are couches galore and a pool, too,
And that is most definitely the perfect shaded blue. Read More »
Millions of American men are joining the ranks of the work-at-home dad — if only temporarily.
One of those was Josh Lubin, a Web advertising executive in Atlanta. After the birth of his child, Josh spent some time at home on paternity leave. Read about his experiences below or by clicking here….
ATLANTA, Georgia — Going back to work after my wife had our first child was an emotional roller coaster.
The author says that being “Mr. Mom” is appealing, but putting the idea into practice is harder than it looks. Read More »
Don’t be surprised if you see more dads on the playground with the kids during the workday.
According to a 2007 CareerBuilder.com Working Dads survey, 37 percent of working dads say they’d leave their jobs if their spouse or partner made enough money to support the family. If given the choice, another 38 percent would take a pay-cut to spend more time with their kids.
The CareerBuilder.com survey, “Working Dads 2007,” was conducted from February 15 to March 6, 2007 and included 1,521 men, employed full-time, with children under the age of 18 living at home.
* Nearly one-in-four (24 percent) working dads feel work is negatively impacting their relationship with their children.
* Forty-eight percent have missed a significant event in their child’s life due to work at least once in the last year and nearly one-in-five (18 percent) have missed four or more.
The time working dads spend on work far exceeds the time spent with their children. Read More »
Kelly Lieberman is a serial entrepreneur, domain strategist, devoted mom. And she remembers vividly the day her daughter, Lily, “outed” her as a work-at-home parent
Lily was in first grade. She was asked to draw a picture of what her parents did for a living, and what she would like to do when she grew up.
During the parent-teacher conference, Kelly and husband Joe say pictures of Joe in a suit at his desk with a computer, Lily as a princess, and Kelly in a night gown with a laptop on a bed.
“I was mortified,” Kelly recalls. “Thank goodness everyone knew me.” Read More »
Johnson & Johnson’s division that makes Motrin might be wanting 800 milligrams of ibuprofen right about now.
A couple of black eyes and a sore ego seems to be afflicting the group.
Seems that they came out with a campaign that suggested moms who carry their kids in slings, pouches, pappooses (or however those things are spelled) and elsewhere on the female human physique tend to get sore. Read Forbes’ take here. Marketing guy Seth Godin had a POV, too.
“It’s a good kind of pain. It’s for my kid. Plus it totally makes me look like an official mom.”
Not a nanny. Not a surrogate. Not a grandma, a bubbie, a nanna. But an “official mom.”
Avoiding for the moment any discussion surrounding what or who “An Official Mom” may really be, what about an “Official Dad.” Do we count? Does our pain amount to less than that of a mom, or are we so muscle bound and ripped that carrying junior in a papoose is just another weight disc on the barbell?
So I got an invitation to become friends or some such with a happy lass on FaceBook. Never saw her before, but because she posted her picture (with a Miller Lite in hand, no less), and she’s a Gator, and she looked like someone I might have wanted to party with (20 ago before I met my wife and the mother of my three kids), I declined the invite and short-circuited any potential temptation….
But “Kristen” also had a widget, or sidebar, or some such (whatever they call them over at FaceBook) on her site called “Smart People Humor.”
Minimum-mandatory notwithstanding, I clicked on the link.
It featured a book, In the Event of my Untimely Demise, from some guy named Brian Sack, someone I’d never heard of, but whom I discovered in short order that he was someone I’d wanted to learn more about. Apparently my home office IS a cave from which I don’t emerge often, as this guy gets more airtime than a Polymagist caught in a doctor-shopping Oxycontin scheme on a slow news week when Fox, CNN, MSNBC and KCCI in Des Moines are scrambling for a lead story.
Or when Paris comes out in a video with her own energy plan.
In one video clip, Sack was a guest on The Glenn Beck Show on Headline News, with his son, Antek (It’s Polish, Sack has to explain it every time. Tell me about it. Zbar’s Polish, too…), shilling his book. In another, he’s hyping perfect holiday gifts, including a pint-sized plastic baby with a cigarette in its mouth that when lit, burns like incense.
But I digress.
After arriving in my home office at 730am, I found myself almost two hours later having explored the Web, watched 20 minutes of Brian Sack videos, and realizing that I needed his book (the subhead read, “20 Things My Son Needs to Know”). Creator of the site Banterist.com, Sack is a funny guy. And he’s a dad. And I ordered his book. I’ll write back when I’ve read the back cover.
January day, actually, when I first went home to work. It was 1989 when I became a home officer. It was an October day in 1991 when I became a work-at-home dad.
Things have never been the same since.
With three kids, a dog and the associated chaos that comes in tow, I’ve learned a few things about working from home.
