Lawyer Mama

Adorable Squishy Newborn Photos!

I have adorable newborn photos up on LightHearted Photography, the Blog.  They will make your uterus ache.  (If you have one.)

Ask Me Anything

I'm obsessed with these anonymous questions from Formspring. I'm going to put this in the sidebar when I get home from New Orleans. In the meantime, ask away!

Work and the Military Family

Updated: The show is now embedded below.

Work. Career,  Two incomes.

It's something that many people take for granted when the economy is booming.  Many of us rely on a second salary in the family to pay the bills or to have even a hope of saving for the future.  But what happens when the economy is in trouble, jobs are scarce, and you have to move every two years?  What happens when you move to a new city across the country or overseas, your spouse is deployed and you can't find quality day care so you can get back to work?

Welcome to the world of the military spouse.

Join me for a blog radio program with Fem 2.0 on Wednesday, April 3rd at 1pm.  For the last two weeks, Fem 2.0 has been getting into the nitty gritty of balancing work and family.  This week, they're tackling an often forgotten class of women: the military spouse.

Join host Katie Stanton, Director of New Media for Blue Star Families, Stephanie Himel-Nelson, blogger Liberal Army Wife, and the President of the National Research Center for Women and Families, Diana Zuckerman for the program Work/Life and the Military: What It’s Really Like to Work and Serve.

From the Fem 2.0 website:

Military families are just like other families. Soldiers and their spouses are often are dealing with same work/life issues as everyone else, like wage gaps, caregiving, sick leave and more. But imagine dealing with these issues when you and/or your spouse are stationed overseas and serving in often dangerous situations for months or years at a time. Imagine being separated from your loved ones and still being expected to handle the day-to-day. Imagine being uprooted with little to no warning and moving to an unknown city or country, over and over again, and still having to provide for yourself and your family. Three experts who are passionate about military families and the difficulties they face will tell the whole story on what life is really like, how this kind of living affects men, women and children, and what can be done to help.

You can listen to the program Work/Life and the Military: What It’s Really Like to Work and Serve and join the chat.  We'll be taking questions via Talk Shoe and Twitter at the end of the program.  To participate via Twitter, simply tweet your question and end with the hastag #fem2 or #worklife.  You can read more about how to participate on the program website.

For our BSF blogger friends out there, we'd love it if you could spread the word and join in the blog carnival around this important topic. We're all eager to discuss the very unique issues that face working military families and we have an opportunity with a national platform to reach people who are helping to affect change for working families.  Let's be advocates for our community and speak up!

Cross posted at Blue Star Families.  Stephanie would like to remind everyone that the views she espouses here on her blog are her own and not representative of Blue Star Families or its leadership and members.  Blue Star Families is a non-partisan, non-profit organization formed by military spouses to connect, support and empower military families.

Groundhog's Day Update: It's too Damn Cold!

We have our very own groundhog.  Yep, actually at last count we had three.  They keep reproducing. 

I suppose you're all dying to know if the groundhogs saw any shadows.  Sadly, I cannot report a definitive answer.  You see, while we had both sun and clouds today, the ground is still covered in snow.  If those Virginia groundhogs are anything like the rest of the people in this corner of Virginia, there's no way in hell they're leaving their cozy den.

We got from 6-8 inches of snow this weekend.  And by weekend, I mean it was done on Saturday.  But still, the kids have had no school for TWO DAYS.  Aaaaaand the Chesapeake Public Schools are still closed tomorrow. 

Thankfully, our Montessori pre-school is open tomorrow and I have a sitter lined up just in case.  The 5,000 unread emails in my in-box are starting to get to me and I must get some work done!

Back to the groundhogs.  It just occurred to me that I haven't seen any of the three large rodents this Winter.  Not since Buddy the Dog joined the family.... Hmmmm..... I hope the fuzzy nuisances aren't in a giant burrow in groundhog heaven.