Shannon Hyland-Tassava - The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual

Copyright 2011 Shannon Hyland-Tassava, PhD

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

AttributionYou must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

NoncommercialYou may not use this work for commercial purposes.

No Derivative WorksYou may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Inquiries about additional permissions should be directed to:

Cover Design by One Eye Designs

Author Photo Copyright Genevieve Tassava

Edited by Jane Radke Slade

Print ISBN 978-1-935961-26-0

EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-030-6

For further information regarding permissions, please contact .

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011960912

After reading this book, please visit the author at:

www.shannontassava.com

For Christopher, my partner in parenting and life; for my daughters Julia and Genevieve for giving me the most important job I'll ever have; for my parents for their eternal encouragement and support; and for my beloved tribe.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

From Conference Room to Playroom: Adjusting to Stay-at-Home Motherhood

Mama Self-Care: If Mama Ain't Happy, Ain't Nobody Happy

At-Home Self-Care Basics: An Action Plan for Getting Good Nutrition, Sleep, and Perspective

At-Home Fitness: Maintaining the Machine

Mastering Your Moods: They're Not the Boss of You

Building Your Tribe

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Keeping Your House Clean

Living a One-Income Life in a Two-Income World

Notes to My Rookie Stay-at-Home Self

The Years are Short: Mindful Parenting

So, What Do You Do All Day? (Simple Kid Activities That Won't Break the Bank or Drive You Crazy)

INTRODUCTION

JUST BEFORE THE BIRTH of my second child, I launched a parenting blog, hoping to avoid a repeat of the isolation I experienced during my weeks and months as a first-time stay-at-home mom two years before. I needed a place to express my thoughts and feelings about at-home motherhood, and I hoped to benefit from discussion and connection with other stay-at-home moms who knew exactly what it was like to help a toddler on the potty while simultaneously nursing an infant, one-armedly, standing upand to do this kind of thing all day, every day, with a weird mixture of joy and love tempered by a hefty dose of exhaustion, frustration, and loneliness. Luckily, I did connect with those moms, and that connection changed my mothering experience for the better. Keeping the blog helped me zero in on just what it was about full-time mothering that was so different from any other work environment I had ever been in.

I called the blog Mama in Wonderland, because my experience of transitioning to stay-at-home motherhood had felt like Alice's tumble down the rabbit hole: disorienting, surprising, delightful, and sometimes scary. There are some striking similarities between Alice's adventure and the adventure of stay-at-home motherhood. Consider: things kept shifting and changing for Alice. The cast of characters was compelling, but they made irrational demands of her. She was never alone, yet she felt completely alone.

Before tumbling down the rabbit hole of stay-at-home motherhood, I was a mental health professionala clinical psychologist with a doctoral degree and many years of specialty expertise in the areas of women's health, stress management, and the intersection between behavior, mood, and well-being. My career as a psychologist has taken place in a variety of contexts, from medical settings to a large suburban school district, and finally a solo private psychotherapy practice. In my private practice, I focused on helping women find balance in their lives, cope with stress and emotion and major life changes, and learn positive strategies for living as happily and healthily as possiblesomething I do now as a freelance writer on women's health topics and a part-time private wellness coach specializing in self-care for moms.

With all that education and experience helping other women, I should have embarked upon at-home motherhood with an ease better suited to a baby-food commercial than real life, right? You'd think that I'd have been a pro from day one at coping with postpartum mood swings, meditating away the stress of toddler tantrums, and entertaining my preschooler while effortlessly juggling the cleaning, cooking, and kindergarten carpool. Uh, no. I needed a lot of help. This is one workplace that could definitely use a new-employee manual.

I couldn't find that manual at the time, so I decided to write it myself, for other women adjusting to stay-at-home motherhood. The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual: How to Have a Wondrous Life Amidst Kids and Chaos is a survival guide for any woman transitioning from full-time work to at-home motherhood. I tackle the larger emotional and spiritual issues of in-the-trenches motherhood, and I detail the mundane, practical solutions for making daily mothering life easier and more enjoyable. The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual is designed to be your one-stop shop for at-home mama self-care the book you can grab whether what you need at the moment is advice about improving your mood or ideas for distracting the baby long enough for you to get dinner started. You'll hear from the doctor in me and the mama-next-door in meoften in the same sentence.

As a psychologist specializing in women's wellness, I see well-being as the sum total of multiple things working together: pride and fulfillment in daily work; physical health and fitness; adequate sleep; good nutrition; emotionally sustaining relationships; the successful management of emotional ups and downs; appreciation for life's blessings and simple pleasures; self-acceptance and self-forgiveness of our flaws. I've organized The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual with these components in mind, including chapters devoted to those areas of wellness with which at-home moms often struggle, starting at the very beginning with adjustment to stay-at-home motherhood, in .

From there, the chapters are largely self-contained sources of guidance about one particular topic, with the exceptions of , which work together as an introduction to and a precise action plan, respectively, for women's basic self-care. This means that should one chapter not apply to you, you can easily skip it and go on to another. On the other hand, the book also functions well as a start-to-finish consecutive read; you never know what chapter may surprise you with a new way for you to approach an old issue. It's peppered with stories from my own mothering life and my Mama in Wonderland blognot prettied-up for re-publication, as you'll see!along with stories from women in my tribe, fellow mom friends navigating the journey through motherhood alongside me.

Because I know from experience how important it is to not only attend to your psychological and physical health but also to have a go-to arsenal of kid activities for those days that seem one hundred hours long and during which your sanity is hanging by a thread, I have included a bonus chapter that includes a handy reference list of simple, at-home, tried-and-tested ideas for keeping your children busy and entertained, without spending a lot of money or raiding a craft store.