From Working Girl to Mom

Shifting from working girl to stay-at-home mom can cause culture shock. Anything you learned in the workplace no longer applies. Or does it?

Transfer: Moving the baby from your right arm to your left.

Downsize: When you finally fit into your pre-pregnancy jeans again.

Floating Holiday: Spending Labor Day in the kiddie pool, trying to keep your kids from drowning each other.

Receptionist: Your four-year-old, who has just discovered the Talk button on your cordless phone.

Excused Absence: Surgery. Or a full body cast. Otherwise, you're pretty much on duty all the time.

Company Picnic: Ice pops and tee-ball in the driveway on a warm Tuesday afternoon.

Performance Review: Annually, in bed, on Mother's Day. You've done a good job when you receive homemade greeting cards, flowers and what appear to be Froot Loops mixed with grapes and chocolate chips.

Equal Opportunity Policy: Everyone is given an equal opportunity to fold the laundry, but you're the only one who ever takes it.

Reception Area: The spot near the door where the kids shower Daddy with hugs and accolades, even though you're the one who just spent eleven hours making new outfits for Barbie, reading You Can Name 100 Cars twenty-three times and vacuuming dried Play-Doh from between the couch cushions.

Sick Day: Doing the same thing you do every day, only you feel worse than you normally do.

Company Stationery: Whatever scrap of paper you can find to scribble a note to the teacher on before the bus arrives - usually, the back of a Toys "R" Us receipt.

Layoff: "Would you lay off the Cheese Doodles? I'm making dinner!"

Environmental Protection Compliance: A Diaper Genie and a can of Lysol. Between the tricycles and the recycling containers.

Multi-Tasking: Emptying the dishwasher, filling sippy cups with apple juice and calling your child in sick (again) to the school nurse - all at the same time.

Overtime: Over time, most stay-at-home moms realize there is no overtime in a job that never ends.

Maternity Leave: The hour or so you get to yourself while the hospital nurses clean, weigh and put that cute little pink or blue hat on your newborn.

9 to 5: A half-day.

© Jennifer Singer. Excerpted with permission from "14 Hours 'Til Bedtime: A Stay-at-Home Mom's Life in 27 Funny Little Stories" by Jen Singer (New Edition JUNE 2005 Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing)