I’m a wife and I’m a mom. I am also a work-from-home mom.  For real. I work a real job from home, all while I manage my three children, their activities, meals, snacks, screen time, etc… all the things, and all the snacks. If you’re a mom you get what I’m saying about the snacks.

I’m also pretty sure I’m not the only work-from-home mom who feels like she just can’t quite balance everything out. There are so many other jobs to be mom – work, play, teach, feed, encourage – it’s a lot to handle. Sometimes you learn a lesson and sometimes you just laugh and survive. I started working from home when my oldest child was 8 months old. I just walked down to my office turned on the computer and did my thing. Sometimes while nursing, or changing a diaper, or giving a kid, you guessed it, a snack.  Eventually I realized I needed to hire a part-time nanny to occupy them while I worked from home. In my case, “nanny” is a fancy word for a college girl that I paid to play with my children and feed them while I locked myself in a home office for 3 hours a day. I just like to say nanny because it sounds more important.

Here’s how I realized that a nanny was a necessity…

I taught for an online school from home. At the time, I was teaching 8th grade students. (Go ahead and bless me, I need it.) This meant that I taught my class using an interactive program that allowed me to move things on the screen, instant message with students, and speak on a mic so they could hear the lesson all at the same time.  This particular day, my then almost 2-year-old and 3-year-old were playing sort of quietly in the playroom adjacent to my office.  This was perfect because I needed to teach a class live at the time and I was wearing a headset to speak to them. We were mid-way through the lesson when I hear my daughter say, “Ew!”, quickly followed by “Ew! Ew! Yuck! Yuck! Moooooommmmyyy!”

I mute my mic and ask, “What’s wrong kiddo? Can it wait 5 minutes, I’m almost finished here.”

“Momma, there’s poop on the slide!”

“Poop on the slide? Oh, my goodness! How did poop get on the slide?” I run into the other room fearing that one of them surely has poop on their hands and it is likely all over my cream carpet. (Don’t ask me whose idea it was to put cream carpet in a playroom. It’s another story.) There is, in fact, poop on the slide! I am so grossed out. Also, my almost-2-year-old is bottomless because she has obviously removed her poopy diaper and gone down the slide a few more times for good measure. Smearing the grossness all over her bottom and the slide. Ew.

Frantically, I clean up the kiddos in record time! Remember those students? They’re just taking a quiz! They’ll need me at any moment. I rush back to the computer to rages and roars of laughter. Finally, my phone rings, and my co-teacher shouts through tears of laughter – “You FORGOT to mute your mic! We’ve been cracking up forever!”

Awesome. This is a true story of a work-from-home-mom. Honest to goodness, people. In this moment when I wanted to feel like not enough, when I sort of wanted to cry because I just can’t seem to get it together, I chose to count the blessings of being a Work-At-Home-Mom, so I laughed away. You really can’t make this sh*t up.