Self-Made Mom

• Using your personality to parent:
  If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs Personality Type test at work, you’ll be glad to know you can apply it to your home life now too.  The February issue of Chicago Parent Magazine has an interesting article about using MBTI test to help you figure out what your strengths are as a parent. The article is based on a book by Janet P. Penley, called “Mother Styles: Using Personality Type to Discover Your Parenting Strengths.” 

I took the test 2 years ago and am ESTJ (Extraverted Thinking with Sensing).  My problem solving approach?  “I want to logically analyze and control situations (Thinking) based on pertinent facts and relevant details. (Sensing)”  Right.  Like babies can be controlled.  Logical?  I don’t know a new mother who is also logical.  If you can find one, tell me.  I’ll give a reward.  Sensing, I’ll give myself that one.  I can smell a dirty diaper from a mile away.  But seriously, there’s something to this… My preferred learning style is active, hands-on, and done in a structured way.  Maybe this is why I was a crazy person getting my son on a nap schedule…  What personality type are you?

• She works, has a daughter and can sing, too:
  I’m a huge American Idol fan, and I just love LaKisha Jones.  How she can work at a bank, raise a 4-year old and sing like that is beyond me. Talk about multitasking.  I’ll be voting for you LaKisha!  
• And you thought you got asked to do some crazy stuff at work…
  Debra Pickett of the Chicago Sun-Times resigned from her job last week in part after being called with an assignment to breast-feed her son in public and write about her experience.  Let’s just say she was out of there faster than you can say colostrum.  Thank goodness I’m a Tribune subscriber.
• MomsRising on the rise:
  Check out today’s New York Times article on MomsRising screenings of the Motherhood Manifesto film.  Now, I don’t know how working moms have time to throw a party (I commend you!), but I do know that MomsRising.org is doing great things to promote flexible working arrangements among other causes.  Read along and join!
• Celebrity working mom quotable: Gwenyth Paltrow to People

“When I had kids, I just wanted to be with them…” [But doing a movie a year] “makes you more interesting as a person and a wife and a mother.”   

Gwenyie, way to set a precedent!  Hey boss, I think I just want to do one project this year.  Great, thanks, glad we’re all on the same page.

Tags: Gwenyth Paltrow, working mom, American Idol, LaKisha Jones, MBTI, Myers Briggs, linklove

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