The Pie Life: A Guilt-Free Recipe for Success and Satisfaction by Samantha Ettus

Author:Samantha Ettus [Ettus, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ghost Mountain Books
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Your home team will likely be a work in progress. To compile an initial roster, ask new coworkers, friends, and neighbors to recommend anyone you might need–an exterminator, an electrician, someone reliable to shovel your driveway in the winter. As you meet more people and hear about their favorite tradespeople and other vendors, add them to the list.

Besides a home team, you should also start assembling two other critically important teams. First, there’s the child-care team: babysitters, au pairs, or nannies. It doesn’t matter what you call them, it only matters that you trust them with your precious children. If you think home child care is elitist, think again! There are a range of options, and people all around the world make use of caregivers. In households with two big careers, day care often won’t cut it because workday schedules do not typically conform to a child-care facility’s schedule. Even if they do, a nanny or au pair (typically a young woman from another country who exchanges child care for room and board as well as a small stipend) allows for more career flexibility because parents have less to worry about at home.

For years, sales executive Felicia Alexander counted two nannies as an integral part of her village. She and her husband both worked, and there was no other way to get everything done while assuring the best care for the couple’s son. As time passed and their son got older, the couple largely phased out the nannies, rotating in some “energetic college students” to provide babysitting help. Yet the nannies have remained members of the family’s village.

A second team that should form part of your family’s village is the “doctor team.” When a member of your family experiences a medical emergency, there’s nothing better than having a trusted doctor on speed dial. Anyone who cares for your child, whether it’s you, your partner, your sitter, your assistant, or your mother-in-law, should all have your doctors’ numbers in their phones. They should also know which emergency room you would want them to choose, if it comes to that. These are not pleasant things to think about, but when you are prepared to handle natural disasters–whether home calamities or medical problems–you end up avoiding a bigger issue that can take all of your slices down with it.

Five years ago, Allison, a San Francisco mom of three, collapsed and couldn’t pick herself off the floor. She was crippled by severe anxiety, all the more puzzling since she had no family history of it. Over the next two years, Allison got back on her feet with the help of a team of doctors assembled by her mother. Only two years later, Allison found herself calling upon this team again, this time to help her son with a similar anxiety attack. Allison related to me how heartbreaking her son’s anxiety was, but also how fortunate she felt to already have a team waiting to help. “The only silver lining I can see to the struggle I went through for two years is that I could empathize completely with my child.

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