Hello mothers and others,

As the end of 2021 approaches, we here at LUMO have been doing some reflecting on the last…oh, almost TWO YEARS of pandemic life. We’ve been living in flux, working from home, or not (or both), with our kids at home (or not, or more often than not). We have dressed from the waist up, slapped lipstick on unwashed faces, locked doors, and prayed for quiet. We have blurred our backgrounds to hide the state of our house. We’ve had kids invade our Zoom calls, chased escaped pets mid-meeting, and come up with creative solutions to achieving privacy while not having a home office (hello, walk in closet!).

When we look back at what life as a working mom has been like over the last couple years, we’re shocked and amazed that we survived. 

There is a LOT to cry about, but today we’ve decided that we’d rather laugh. 

And in that light, for your reading pleasure, we’ve gathered together some of our favorite, most embarrassing, most hilarious “work-from-home-meets-parenthood” stories from our community. Take a minute to enjoy all the hilarious humanity we have culled. 

In researching this newsletter, we heard it all. From kids screaming “Mommy come wipe my butt!” loud enough for clients to hear, to children crashing Zoom meetings in disguise “so no one could see me.” We had a mom trying to run a meeting while her kids enjoyed the “bowling alley” they had created in the upstairs hallway, directly over her head. We’ve had gallons of spilled milk, paint disasters, and bad self-haircuts. We heard from a mom whose door lock malfunctioned while she was giving a major presentation, just in time for her four year-old son to come marching into her office in his underwear, playing his recorder at top volume (it took her team awhile to recover from that one!).

There was that time that the neighborhood kids – left unattended for just long enough – began selling belongings out of a mom’s front yard that were most definitely NOT for sale. 

There was the 10 year-old boy who was fond of saying, “Alexa, fart!” as soon as his mom got on a call. And yes, Alexa CAN fart, by the way. In case you were wondering. Fun for (almost) the whole family.

There were even remote schooling bloopers, like the time a first grader opened the shower curtain to ask her naked mom a question. While holding her school laptop. Which was on Zoom with her entire first grade class. (Spoiler alert: it me.)

Y’all, it has been a YEAR. Almost two, really. And while it has been hard, even harrowing at times, we have prevailed! WE’RE STILL HERE. If that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what the heck is.

We hope this missive brought you some much-needed holiday cheer, and we would love nothing more than to heal our collective pain by laughing at your stories too! Share them with us by replying directly to this email.

Yours in leadership and parenting,

Kristin and the LUMO Team