Kee To Wellness

dinner hits my table at 5:47 every weeknight and i haven’t picked a single one of them myself in months, which still feels insane to type out tbh !!!

i’m a working mom of two with a full time 9-5, i log off at 5 and i’m at daycare pickup by 5:15, and a USC study found that moms carry 73% of the cognitive labor at home, and almost all of my share landed in that half hour between the car and the stove with two kids on me and an open fridge.

five things i set up one time in claude and have not touched since:

1. i haven’t opened doordash at 5:45 in months. i type/take a pic my fridge in exactly as messy as it is, half a rotisserie chicken and some rice and a sauce i’m scared of, and one dinner comes back in about 60 seconds!!

2. i have not typed my kids ages or a single food they refuse since the spring. it saved their ages, their schedule, our go-to foods we typically have in the pantry/fridge/freezer and our budget one time and has never asked me again 🙏

3. it sends me the entire week of dinners at 8am on sunday morning while I’m having breaky w my kids! nothing to open, nothing to run, monday it is already there. truly helps me feel more present w my kids on weekends too, esp as a full time workin mama!

4. i have not paid full price for a meal plan i built myself since i started pasting my grocery store’s weekly ad in and letting it plan the week around what’s on sale.

5. i cooked two separate dinners a night for years and i have not made a second kid plate since. my kids and the adults eat the exact same food now. I’m still in shock 😬

the setup was one sunday afternoon and it has run every week since without me.

comment DINNER and i’ll send you the dinner bundle, $34 for all 20 prompts plus the cookbook, so you can run number 1 on tonight’s dinner before you’ve finished the dishes.

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there’s this whole thing online right now cheering on the moms who leave their job to stay home with their kids, and i love that for them, that is a real job and it is HARD, full respect always…

but where’s the same energy for the mom who kept her job?!

bc somehow when a mom works, people still ask if she feels bad about “letting someone else raise her kids,” and no one, not once, has ever said that to a single dad in the history of the world, right?!

i’m still at my 9-5, i log off at 5, i’m in the pickup line at 5:15, i’m plating dinner at 5:47, and my kids are loved and raised and thriving… me working isn’t a thing i’m doing TO them, it’s part of how i take care of them!!

i wanted the insurance and the 401k and the stability, and not everyone grew up with a safety net, so staying in my career was never me choosing money over my kids, it was me choosing my kids AND my job, both get to be true…

so this one’s for the working mom who’s done apologizing for it 🥂

which slide are you screenshotting and sending?? bc i already know

follow Erin Kee | mental load + systems for real systems for real working moms



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nobody tells you that going back after your second is when you finally stop asking permission for things you were already allowed to do!!

i work from home and my husband does most of the drop offs, so pickup is mine, and i want it ! i’m pullin in at 5:15 because that is the most time i get with them all day. for abt a month after i came back i was still taking the 4:30 meetings anyway and then speed walking to my car mid sentence. and then one afternoon i just put the block on my calendar and told nobody, and genuinely nothing happened. no email, no comment, no meeting w leadership. it had been available the whole time and i had just never taken it.

and tbh that’s the part that still gets me!! every single one of these took me one afternoon to set up and not one of them required a conversation. the workout is the one that surprised me the most tho, MWF at noon, blocked and paid for in advance so bailing costs me actual money, and i have not skipped it since. when it was flexible it moved to never!

the last one is the one i’d tell you to start with. 14 yrs of adding a sorry to sentences that did not need one, and it never once made me better at my job, it just made the hours i was already working sound like a favor somebody was doing me.

if you’re back from leave and still asking for permission for your own calendar, this is your sign...

comment SYSTEMS and i’ll send you the mom systems guide, it’s free 🤍

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Thank you for featuring me, Business Insider.

A mom of two kids under four sends at least one long voice memo to Claude a day. It helps her manage her schedule.

(Credit: Erin Kee)

i went back to work after my second and had maybe half the hours i used to have and every single thing on my plate was still on my plate.

before kids i had time for this stuff. i liked planning meals, i liked having the pantry stocked, i had the energy for it and it was honestly kind of fun. then two kids, daycare drop offs, a full time job, and i was doing the same amount of managing with a fraction of the day, at 9pm, on my phone, after everyone was asleep.

for two years i thought i was just bad at being organized. i bought the planners. i did the sunday resets. i tried four different apps. every one of them lasted about 11 days and then i’d be back to holding all of it myself and feeling like the problem was me.

i had a really specific way i wanted everything done, and i would rather do it myself than explain it, and then i’d take it back and redo it anyway. that was the actual thing i had to fix and it was not fun to hear!

so if you’ve got a graveyard of half used apps and a sunday reset you abandoned in march, same...

comment MTG and i’ll send you the one page we use for the 20 minutes, it’s free 🤍

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