FREE Document Publishing Site and Rotating Goal List PRINTABLE

I'm super excited to share this awesome free document publishing site and my first printable!

Lately, I've been talking a lot about working on my productivity because my to-do list has been feeling super overwhelming. For a while now I've been LOVING this Rotating Goal List that I found on pinterest because it will allow me to prioritize the important things without having to look at the whole list. Corn Flower Blue Studio gives a great tutorial on how to make it, here. However, as soon as I saw that it involved crafts, my heart sank! I am just not that crafty; but to craft something up on the computer - right up my alley.

So I got to work making my first printable, in Microsoft Word (I'm not that fancy,) but wanted to be able to display it and allow anyone to download it from my blog.

Enter Scribd, which enabled me to do this:
 
Rotating Goal List Printable

Isn't it pretty? (Click the fullscreen button for the best view!)

Scribd is great for self-publishing and can be embedded into your blog!  There are so many great ways to self-publish (another one here) but this one is super easy since you can basically upload any document in any format. It also keeps analytics for you. Awesome! (This isn't sponsored or anything, I just really like it and had to share!)

Ok, so back to the printable itself. When I was a teacher, I used to make coordinate plane white boards by slipping a huge coordinate plane into a sheet protector; then I had plenty of "white boards" to pass out to students for graphing practice. So - that's what I did with this: print, slip, write. Whenever I feel like I'm running around aimlessly, trying to accomplish too many things at once, I pull out this little sheet and refocus myself.

This rotating goal list white board has been so successful, I've come up with a few additional printable white boards that I'll be sharing in my next post.

Sincerely,

P.S. - How do you keep your to-do lists from overwhelming you?

Feed Read: The Infamous 1st Birthday Cake Smash and Other Baby Photos

I finally booked a photog for our little one's first professional photo shoot. I'm super excited about the cake smash and have been busy pinning ideas all morning. Check out my One board for some awesome cake smash photo shoot ideas, as well as first birthday plans. It's still a month away but I can't wait to share the photos with you! For this weeks feed read I've got a couple of my favorite articles about taking pics of baby and tips for planning your own cake smash shoot.

While nursing my son, I get about 3-5 min where I can just sit & read. Every week, I'm going to start you off with a Feed Read: links to sites that I enjoyed and would recommend to you whenever you get your own five minutes.

Tips and cute ideas for baby photos at the hospital, week-by-week, month-by-month (plus free printable,) plus a few more cute props & locations.

6 Tips for Cake Smash Photo Shoot

Here's the cake I'm making for our cake smash, (but I'm planning on icing the whole thing and adding sprinkles and a candle.)

Update: Wondering how it all went down? Check it out here.

Sincerely,

P.S. - Got any great first birthday resources you'd like to share?

The Comeback: Stay at Home Moms Who Returned to Their Career

Spending the week in a hotel with a baby means a lot of very quiet, no-movement time during naps. I actually really enjoy it because if I was at home I would get distracted by things around the house but in the room I get the opportunity to not do much else but play on pinterest, read, or blog.

I'm not sure where I happened upon this book, but I recently picked up The Comeback by Emma Gilbey Keller. I've only made it through the first 11 pages of the introduction, but I already love it. This woman could be reading my mind.

"My work was my world."

Mine too! I was a self proclaimed workaholic and I lived and breathed my job, to the extreme (because of my strengths) but I LOVED work in general. Before we got married I told my husband, that no way in the world would I be a SAHM, some people can hack it - but not me.

The author has the same type of situation, essentially, her husband (by no fault of him and willingly by her) had a career that received priority and essentially caused her to become a SAHM.

"The biggest adjustment women face when they give up work - more even than loosing an income - is that their confidence starts to decline. Being in the outside world, getting paid, and communicating with adults is healthy and energizing. Giving that up is tough on the ego. Some women feel diminished and inadequate. Some get lonely and depressed. They can be very, very busy and very, very bored."

BINGO. I couldn't have said it better myself.

I think she highlights two main things about being a SAHM: that it can be mind-numbing and that it effects your self-esteem. There is a strong correlation between the two, being given only menial tasks at work feels like a demotion, and while child-rearing is a very important job, changing diapers and cleaning up puke can be demoralizing.

Eventually, the author gets to a point where her daughter said to her "I go to school. Molly goes to school. Daddy goes to work. And Mommy goes to...gym." And she realized that it was time to go back to her career; which leads to The Comeback, her search for women who "took an extended maternity leave," paused their careers, and successfully returned to them. Something that I dream of doing.

I always wonder if I'm the only woman out there that feels this way, which is why I started this blog. Just reading part of the intro to this book made me feel like there is hope for me, that this is the right decision, and that I will be able to return to an amazing job someday.

Sincerely,
Jordan

P.S. - I want to hear from you! If you are a SAHM - do you feel the same way? If your a career mom - what do you think? Or if your just a woman in general who has been there or may be here someday - thoughts? Advice? Am I all alone out there on this one?

What Does This Say About Us?

I was listening to a story on NPR the other day, (I tried to find the story but could not figure out what it was) all I remember is that the guy who was being interviewed was an academic who was using google for social research. You know how when you are at the google search box and you type in a question and it starts to auto populate responses...like:

From this he might conclude that we are cat loving, man hating, and exhausted. (The iron was from my search history - good to know.

What will we do without Regis!? lol

Well, I believe his research was about stereotypes but the researcher was basically inferring things about our population based on the results. What does this say about us?

Now to my point, I happened to be googling around and happened to find this Employability Checkup Report from the Department of Labor. I found it to be interesting. It takes your education and wage info and combines it with your location, job, and industry to give you a little report on your employability per the economy in your area.

The results, were interesting; I'm not sure I agree with everything. The local unemployment rate, while it is lower than the national, is only like half a percentage point lower, I don't think that counts. In our area, my education level is about average, and so I wouldn't say that counts either. Based on just their numbers, my employability is about 50%.

I decided to test it out where we used to live in DC and was kind of surprised to get the same thing. There were also some conflicts: local unemployment is low and state unemployment is high!? When I selected DC the "local" and the "DC" were one in the same (it's not that big!)

Regardless, I found the tool interesting, and although somewhat inaccurate, of possible use to career switchers or people who are moving. I would most certainly take everything with a grain of salt because...this doesn't really give you the whole perspective.

One last thing, I found these numbers on my state's job bank website: the jobs to resumes number is pretty sad (assuming the resumes are active seekers.) Our state's unemployment is pretty bad and while it doesn't entirely apply to me at this exact moment, it's enough to keep me motivated to stay on my toes.

Sincerely,
Jordan

P.S. - Thoughts? Find anything interesting in the google autofill?