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first name: Jenni

age: 29

occupation: Market Manager

how do you structure your time and space? My working hours are typically 8:00 to 5:30, and have to close two days a week, which puts me home around 7:00 p.m. Of the days when I close, my mom gets Noah one evening, and I have a pair of wonderful babysitters who get him the other night. I also work two Saturdays a month from 8:00 to 5:00 and have one of my fabulous sitters on that day.  

Our house is messy (but not dirty) and has all the regular clutter of a three-year-old. A tricycle, a train set and Legos all are on the living room floor as I type this. On a typical night, Noah goes to bed at 7:30 (he doesn’t necessarily go to sleep but he is in bed with books and bunnies by that time), and I have a few hours to myself. I am going back to school to get my MBA online, so I do homework and watch TV until my bedtime. 

Until 7:30, I try to be as “in the moment” as possible, since I don’t have as much time with Noah as I would like. With the days getting longer and the weather getting nicer, we usually eat dinner on the front porch to take advantage of the sunshine and avoid the TV. Noah is allergic to practically everything (peanuts, milk, eggs, soy and wheat) so we currently subsist almost entirely on a diet of chicken nuggets and peaches. This makes dinner time easy. 

using the metaphor of seasons to describe the phases of women’s lives,

-what are the particular challenges and highlights of your current season? We are currently in summer at my house. We are finally getting more time to spend together, enjoying longer days to play outside, and relaxing with fewer schedules to keep. Noah loves to be outside (he might live out there if no bugs were around!) so he is having so much fun right now. There is a park just down the street from our house, and we try to go there at least once or twice a week. Since I started back to school, I am feeling the pinch of not having enough time to do everything. The rule at our house is that if something isn’t going to hurt us or someone else, we don’t fight about it. Life is too short so we pick our battles. 

-What season(s) preceded this one? We were in winter before moving back to Memphis in November. I worked about 70 hours a week at my old job, and Noah was in daycare at least 60 hours a week. It has always just been the two of us, but I had a great network of babysitters and friends there to call on. Even so, I was always tired and depressed from working at a job I no longer enjoyed and one that took me away from my son so much. I began looking for a new job that would facilitate my relocation to Memphis to be close to my family. Obviously, the job market is rather bleak right now, but I was connected with my current company through a wonderful woman at my home church.

-What season(s) might your future hold? I think we are headed into fall. New and exciting things are happening for both of us. With my going back to school and Noah’s learning so much every day (including potty training, which I thought would never happen), it feels like the beginning of a new semester. I am working to figure out how to make time for everything (including myself), and I feel like I am trying to find my way around campus all over again.

favorite family activity/activities: playing on the playground, taking nature walks, finding pretty flowers to smell, and watching movies (currently the Toy Story series is our favorite). We also love going to the zoo and to ballgames.

favorite solo activities: drinking wine, watching TV, reading, napping, hanging out with friends, especially at restaurants I can’t go to with a child. (I know that’s not solo but it is a non-Mommy activity.)

sources of inspiration: My mom is definitely a big inspiration to me. She was a single mom when I was younger until we met her wonderful husband, and she understands what I am going through. Sometimes we drive each other crazy but that unconditional love is still there. Likewise, I want Noah to know that he can always come to me so we can work through things together, even when he knows I will be upset.

best MakeShift moment: Our life is one big makeshift moment. I tried to think of one that I was not too embarrassed to admit (unlike the fact that my three-year-old still sleeps in a crib because he doesn’t know he could climb out, and I like having him contained to prevent arguments that involve words like, “no you can’t play in your playroom right now…go back to bed”). Or the fact that my mom taught him to “Cheers,” and he knows you only do that with a wine glass and likes to do it a billion times if we go out to dinner and someone has wine.

I came up with the day I taught him which button to push on his DVD player so he can change the DVD as many times as he wants when we travel, and I don’t have to pull over. He knows how to skip commercials (previews) and push the “circle button” to start it when the menu comes on. It made our many six-plus-hour trips from Chattanooga to Memphis more bearable.

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Tags: allergic, back to school, jenni, market manager, MBA, move, single mom

This entry was posted on Monday, May 3rd, 2010 at 7:35 am and is filed under mothers of invention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.