Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to vent just a little bit. I would like to describe to you A DAY IN THE LIFE of a stay-at-home mom. My intention is not to scare you or to discourage you from having children. By all means, go ahead! But do enjoy life without kids first. Then you will have a better chance of enjoying your children, once you have them!

As you have probably guessed by now, I am talking about my own life as a mother of three. My "oldest" child is only 4 and a half years old. Some people, upon hearing this, say they feel sorry for me. This, I can not understand — after all, none of the pregnancies were twins! In addition, I do not need to go to work outside of the home at the moment. If I did, I would surely be even more of a basket case than I am now.

Just the other day, I was asked to fill out a questionnaire concerning "how often people are absent from work in order to care for a sick child." The purpose was to calculate, in monetary value, how many precious working hours are lost when a kid is sick; also, how much of the taxpayers' money gets wasted in the process.

I was extremely offended by this, since not a single question concerned the extra stress and work that a sick child imposes on a stay-at-home mom! I wrote some savage comments in the margin, which made me feel better — but the underlying issue is huge: no one calculates the amount of unpaid work done in the home. In the questionnaire I answered about sick children and work, there were blanks to fill concerning the following:

• The average working day of the parent(s) (how many hours)
• The average working week of the parent(s) (how many days)
• Extra childcare expenses (how often and how much)

Well, I decided to answer the questions truthfully.

• Average working day……….24 hours
• Average working week……..7 days
• Extra childcare expenses……none, since grandparents and friends have been actively employed with no salary at all.

Just imagine how much taxpayers' money has been saved in our family by taking care of our sick children without any outside help and without any absences from work!

But now let me get back to my topic: A DAY IN THE LIFE.

Every single day, the alarm goes off at 5.50 A.M. Not the alarm clock, the alarm baby! Coffee is being made in our household no later than 6 A.M. The next two children appear in the kitchen at 7 A.M. One thing I complain about every single day is the lack of childrens' TV programs on weekday mornings!

But thank God for videos! They are a real morning-saver, since any planned childrens' activities start no earlier than at 9 A.M. Getting the children to these activities is a big project — much harder than any unexperienced person could imagine . . .

As it is, the climate in Finland sets its limitations as to how children must be dressed. It is not shorts and a T-shirt every day, NO! It is layer upon layer of warm clothing: thick winter clothing and often a rubber suit to top it off, on muddy days (meaning about half of the time, since winters have been getting warmer in recent years).

The dressing project takes me half an hour, with three children, two of whom are still in the diaper stage, which means that one of them will definitely produce something into his or her diaper after I have gotten them ready, which means: take off clothes, change diaper, dress again — at least 10 minutes of wasted time! Without my own car, we would never be on time for anything.

Finally, we are out of the door and in the car. I can now get rid of one child for a few hours, since our church organizes a play group twice a week. Relieved of the oldest one, then, I have "only" two kids to go grocery shopping with. Groceries? What groceries? After I plant the baby in the safety seat of the shopping cart, the two-year old needs to sit in the cart — leaving me with NO room for the groceries.

If I let the two-year old walk beside the cart, it takes him two seconds flat to disappear in the wilderness of Prisma. So, I give him a basket to hold while sitting in the shopping cart. It is always embarrassing to unload the groceries when paying for them — the lids of the yoghurt cartons are all poked through, the oranges are squeezed, the insides of tomatoes are oozing out, and the only thing saving us from being arrested for shoplifting is the proof: candy bar wrappers with NO candy bar inside.

By this time, the baby is giving a concert that is a beckoning call to all old ladies over the age of 60. From all over the store, they flock to our rescue. "Oh, you poor sweet thing, has mommy been teasing you again?" they crow ... while the two-year-old (who hates strangers), chimes in with an empathetic note. This is a major time for decision-making: leave the store AND the groceries, or endure the racket, chanting a calming mantra to myself, like: "crying never killed anyone; crying never killed anyone . . ."

Crying never killed the child, but what about the mother's nerves?

God gets a call from me again. "Please let McDonald's be open!" French fries and ketchup will cure anything! Oh-oh, even that fails this time. The 2-year-old suddenly throws up — ketchup and fries all over poor Ronald's floor!

WOW! Lucky we are not at home yet! I just got the carpet cleaned after the last stomach bug! But this new problem warrants a visit to the pharmacist, since we are out of Osmosal, the magic drink for barf and diarrhea. After you get the stubborn 2-year-old to drink it, that is. One good way is to use the famous Doctor Threat: "If you don't drink this, we MUST go to the doctor!" It usually works, but it is actually no lie: in my experience, a child can throw up his insides in just one day so badly that an i.v. is needed to compensate for the loss of fluids [Marjo is a registered nurse].

One good thing about days like this is: a stomach bug is an excellent excuse for not cooking a proper meal. In addition, the poor patient does not notice if I (once again) compensate for my dinner with a bag of chips and a carton of ice cream. This is a sin which mothers usually need to commit in secret, telling the kids: "What? Did you say you smelled chocolate? IMPOSSIBLE!"

The best time of the day is from 5 PM to 6 PM. I call it "Mommy's Happy Hour," since Channel 2 finally shows an hour of quality children's TV programs. I take my well-deserved coffee break then. Yes, it may as well be admitted that all mothers are caffeine addicts. I always imagine that if war were to break out, the worst thing would be not having access to proper coffee!

After I get the kids to bed, I don't even turn on the radio. I revel in the silence. No one will make any demands on me for approximately eight hours (well, maybe tonight a grand puke-fest is to be expected).

Even so, even after a day like this, I wouldn't change my life for anything! During the day I receive an overdose of ... LOVE — all the love I can possibly handle. Nothing could give me more satisfaction.

With the strength this gives me, I will be able to face yet another "day in the life."