Back in high school, I wasn’t really much of a “science girl” {or a “math girl” or a “history girl” for that matter!!} but much to my disappointment, high schools don’t really care about that and end up forcing you to take those classes anyways!  So when it came time to choose my annual curriculum, I did what any girl would do…I chose the classes that had the cutest teachers!!  In turn, Biology 101 it was!  One full year of dissecting frogs, memorizing cell anatomy and staring at our very handsome biology teacher!  Needless to say, I made the best of it!

What I remember most about biology, even now – almost two decades later – is learning about cells and feeling terribly bad for the nucleus!  That poor cell nucleus had such a big job; maintaining the entire integrity of that cell and basically acting as control central to keep things in check and balance.  Geesh, that’s a lot of responsibility for something so tiny!

After a little over thirteen months of being a new Mother and a business owner, I’m starting to feel like I can relate immensely to the nucleus that I sympathized with so much.  Somehow, seemingly overnight, I feel like I {just like nearly every other woman I know} have become control central…the command post of our household that needs to keep everything in balance.  It’s as though from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, ten thousand things need to happen and they all need to happen in a specific order!  The cat needs to be fed, the baby needs to be changed, the car needs to be taken in for its oil change.  Emails need to be returned, appointments need to be made, blog posts need to be written.  My husband deserves my time, my son deserves my time, my clients deserve my time, I deserve my time.  That, my friends, is a whole lot of time!  And I’m just tiny, little me.

I bring all of this up because lately, one of the most common questions that I receive {and felt the need to answer} is…how do you balance it all?  How do you find the time to make it all happen?  Well, the truth is, that its taken me close to the better part of a year to figure it out and even then, it only works until my son decides to throw a stick in the spokes and then we go tumbling head over handlebars one more time!  There was a time {aka. last summer} when our days involved being up at 6am everyday and not going to bed until 1am or 2am the next morning.  It was ridiculous and most definitely should be the exception and not the rule.  But it was a lesson that we needed to learn in order to stop doing it!  I think that life in general can be tricky to balance at the best of times…but life with a young child and a business can be extra hard, and please allow me to be the first to say that all of it kicks my ass a lot of the time!

I am very, very lucky for two reasons; 1.) my husband is incredible and helps so much with everything!  He works so hard during the day and then comes home and plays with the baby, cooks dinner, helps to clean up and then does all kinds of work for the business.  Bottom line, my husband deserves a gold star every single day and none of this would work without him.  2.)  I am fortunate not to be living in the 1950s and this sort of ‘domestic distribution’ is considered perfectly acceptable!!!!  We live in a time when women are encouraged to have careers of their own and men are encouraged to play their part at home…so all in all, this works in my favour!  And part of it is my husband’s own fault because he’s just better in the kitchen than I am!

There is still one very significant difference between my husband and I though…and that is the fact that my husband is a ‘mental note taker’, which – as far as I’m concerned – is code for “I’ll do my best to remember the date, time and place of where we need to be…but there are no guarantees!”  This, simply does not fly with me!  I am the complete opposite of my husband, which means that I’m a neurotic perfectionist that writes everything down eighteen times on post-it notes and in two different daytimers.  It’s just how I roll and I kinda like it that way!  It’s also that neurosis, once embraced, that finally helped to make our household function rather smoothly!!!

And it looks a little something like this…

I have a hard cover weekly calendar that sits on my desk so that I can see the entire week ahead of time.  Each day of the week has its own post-it note {yes, cut to size…because I’m that awesome!}.  The post-it notes have each day’s to-do list, and when I say to-do list…I mean to-do list.  Everything!  From scheduling meetings to grocery shopping to showering.  It has to go on that list.  My mind likes lists…if it sees something on a list, it reacts as though we’re in third grade and someone just triple dog dared me to get it done.  Basically, if I see something on a list…it’s ON!  If something on the daily to-do list doesn’t get done…it goes to the top of the list on the next day’s…and so on and so on.  This ensures that everything gets done in priority.

Then there is our highlighter…my beautiful, sacred, yellow highlighter!  The highlighter marks times on the calendar when any member of our family is expected to be somewhere.  Whether Steve has class or Hudson has a doctor’s appointment or I have a shoot…every time one of us is out of the house, it’s marked with our yellow highlighter {with the exception of Steve’s work day}.  This not only helps us to keep track of who is where at any given time…but it also ensures that our house functions with one car!

And lastly, we backtrack!  If anything has a due date in our house {and most things do…from delivering images to a client or sending a birthday card on time}…we backtrack to give ourselves enough time to get it done by marking each necessary step on our to-do lists and then adding two extra days of margin {for all of the fun and unexpected stuff that comes up…like the flu!}.  If we’ve learned anything over the past year…it’s that our child runs the show these days and in turn, we need to leave margin in everything we do because things seldom ever go as planned.

I’m not going to lie…it’s not glamorous or sophisticated or spontaneous.  Heck…it’s not even electronic..but it works for us.  It gives us the time that we need together as a family, while getting everything done on time {for the most part!} and still ensuring that we don’t burn our candles at both ends.  I’m sure that a cell nucleus uses an iPhone or something totally rad like that but, come on…a nucleus has genetic material to keep in order {there’s an app for that, right?!?!}…I just have our household to keep from falling apart!!!  And besides, a phone just doesn’t triple dog dare me the way a post-it note does!!!