Sarah Preston Gorenstein is a magazine writer, editor, journalist, and digital content producer…when she’s not navigating the rough terrain of Working Motherhood. A former nightlife columnist and dating blogger for Chicago magazine, Sarah reinvented herself when she became a mom in 2009 and began chronicling her new life for The Parenting Post, blogging about all the issues that plague working moms today. She was a new mom while simultaneously serving as the full-time managing editor of Playboy.com. She worked for Playboy for nearly a decade, which never ceases to provide her with colorful material for her writing.
Sarah’s the beaming mom of a happy two-year-old named Preston, and just as she finally felt settled into motherhood she took on her hardest project yet—trying to conceive baby no. 2. Tune in to the Fertility Files every other day to read about Sarah’s personal, and often painful, journey going through secondary infertility.
If you want to read more about Sarah and her adventures in parenthood, see an archive of Parenting Posts below. She also blogs regularly on her personal site here (www.thecosmomom.com), where she holds absolutely nothing back. Ever.
Today’s blog is for adults only, so please turn off your computers when the kids are home from school. I want to talk about s-e-x, especially the kind of s-e-x that happens after the kids have come into your marriage. Let’s call it SAK (sex after kids). We all need to have SAK, but how and when do you schedule it in, when you’re both working, sleep-deprived and feeling (and looking) like a very unsexy version of your former self, and have zero to no time to get busy in the bedroom?Read Full Post
Marriage isn’t always easy—and it doesn’t come naturally to everyone—but parenthood, in my opinion, is a different story. You either are a good parent, or you’re not—and it either comes naturally to you, or it doesn’t. And I am so lucky that I found myself a man who treats being a parent like it’s his job every bit as much as it is mine. My husband is the best father to our son that I could've ever asked for…and that's one of the things that helps make our marriage work, after three eventful years together. This blog is dedicated to him.Read Full Post
I posed this very question to my Facebook friends about two weeks ago, the week before Preston turned two. The answers, to my surprise, were unanimous: Every Chicago parent I know started their kid(s) in preschool either right before, or right after they turned two. Yes, TWO. And I’m not talking daycare type of preschools either. I’m talking preschools of the private variety. Is this the norm, I wondered? Who better to ask than you guys, my outspoken Parenting readers. So, I ask you: Is two the age you enroll your tots in preschool where you live? Because where I live, even though it is, I have to question whether or not it’s absolutely necessary at this age…especially considering how much preschool costs in the city of Chicago. Keep reading if you want to know the answer to that one (it shocked the hell out of me).Read Full Post
Dear Preston: So, here we are, another year later—and today’s your birthday. The second year was so much different than the first. By the time you turned one, you weren’t walking, much less doing more than army crawling. But all that changed just before you turned 18 months—you became an Olympic speed crawler, and before we knew it you were walking, letting yourself into all of our rooms, reaching on top of our counters, dunking basketballs, throwing tennis balls for Barkley to fetch, and getting into all kinds of trouble, including but not limited to bumping your gorgeous (albeit somewhat large) forehead at every turn. You were the baby who didn’t move a muscle—now you’re the toddler who won’t sit still. Funny how fast things change…Read Full Post
Did you read in TheJournal about the sex-bias lawsuit between the EEOC and Bloomberg LP, alleging the financial news and media giant routinely discriminates against new and expectant moms at their company? The judge’s ruling concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the allegations of the bias, and that ANYONE—mom or not—who chooses to spend a significant amount of their time away from work, for any reason, would “face hurdles to advancement at the workplace,” especially at a company like Bloomberg which “explicitly makes all-out dedication its expectation.” A great message for the working mom? Hardly.Read Full Post
I was talking to someone recently who told me his daughter, who’s now eight, never went through the Terrible Twos. She was a colicky baby for the first four months of her life, then, he says, it was smooth sailing from there. I had a really hard time believing him, because although I’ve publicly and unabashedly gushed on this blog and to anyone who will listen that I have The Perfect Child, and he was also The Perfect Baby (and I still believe this to be true), he is most definitely going through the Terrible Twos right now, and has been for a few months (he officially turns two on August 29). The tantrums have not only increased in their frequency, they’ve increased in their intensity. There are moments during these tantrums when my own child is almost unrecognizable to me…Read Full Post
On my flight to L.A. on Friday (for the annual Midsummer Night’s Dream party at the Playboy Mansion in L.A., which was a blast, by the way), I read this week’s Time cover story: "Chore Wars.” Not surprisingly, the headline grabbed me the second I saw it at the airport kiosk. Incidentally, one of the many things I love about traveling for work is the rare alone time I score at the airport and during the flight, and even rarer opportunities to read (yes, read!)—magazines, books, in-flight publications, anything I can get my hands on. So I couldn’t wait to board my flight to LAX to dig into this week’s hot parenting topic about the great chore divide…Read Full Post
I do. I’m one of those people who falls in love with newborns instantly—they make my uterus ache. Every time I visit a friend in the hospital who’s just given birth, I am transported back to August 29, 2009, the day my son was born. I love the newborn stage—they’re so innocent and precious, and so dependent on you for everything. I don’t think I’ve met a newborn baby I haven’t fallen head over heels in love with the minute I met him/her. I’m going to steal a friend’s term for this unconditional love and adoration: baby goggles. I am guilty as charged, but I can't say the same for my friends.Read Full Post
I’m not—nor have I ever been—an over-caller. I wasn’t an over-caller with my OB/GYN when I was pregnant either. I think I made a couple of neurotic phone calls in the 9 ½ months I was pregnant. And since Preston was born, I haven’t called his pediatrician an obsessive amount—unless he’s running a high fever, throwing up, or having excessive diarrhea. Because my son wasn’t much of a mover and shaker for the better part of his first year, and wasn’t even walking till about 17 ½ months, it prevented injuries from happening. I think I took this for granted, because now that he’s discovered his inner daredevil, I am a nervous wreck, especially after this past weekend. He had two—count them, two!—injuries, that amounted to one after-hours phone call to the ped’s office (they charge $25 for after-hours phone calls, by the way!). Read Full Post
We spent a long weekend in Cossopolis, Michigan, which started first thing Thursday morning (or, really, Monday, when my husband began running around town like a mad man all week to get everything we could possibly need/not need for this four-day road trip). The amount of stuff we jammed into our SUV was pretty amazing—Jay could be a professional packer. And that stuff included the two of us, Preston AND our dog Barkley, who had to sit in the back seat next to Preston for two hours rather than the roomy trunk that was stuffed to the gills with water rafts, toys, food, clothes, diapers, beach towels, more clothes, more diapers, bottles upon bottles of sun block, bug spray, a flashlight or two, paper goods, cooking and cleaning supplies—you name it, we brought it. And this is what you call a “summer vacation”? Read Full Post
