Don't Wait Until June: The WFH Mom's Summer Prep Plan

WFH moms who wait till summer have already lost! That's not going to be you!

In this episode, we’re talking about how to balance running a business and being present with your kids—without burnout, guilt, or constant overwhelm. If you’ve ever felt like you’re failing at both work and motherhood during summer break… this conversation will change everything.

Takeaways:

•  Why your normal work schedule won’t work in summer (and what to do instead) 
•  The powerful strategy of “front stacking” your business before summer hits 
•  How to create a summer schedule that prioritizes memories first 
•  Simple systems to reduce stress (and still keep income flowing) 
•  The mindset shift that will eliminate mom guilt—for good 

CTA:
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Transcript

Leah Remillét: This episode is very strategically placed in April to give you time to implement the ideas so that you can absolutely have the best summer possible. This is about helping you to do the things that you have to do. As a busy working mom who needs to make sure that bills are paid, food is on the table, but also wants to be wildly present with your kids and have a great summer making incredible memories.

I recorded this episode originally three years ago, and I listened to it today because I wanted to make sure that I still felt really good about it I was on my elliptical. I got to the very end, I started sobbing, I had to get off the elliptical. I was crying so hard. You'll know when you get to the place.

And here's why. Three years ago, I recorded this episode with my oldest being a senior in high school. Today, I'm sharing this episode with you with my baby, being a senior in high school, and I can tell you that what I shared, I believe even more fervently now These are tried and true when you choose to make the best of these moments we have with our kids, you will never regret it.

So let's jump in to this episode.

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The Working Mom’s Guide to Summer

This is the Working Moms Guide to Summer vacation summer break when your kids are home from school. When my kids were little, I didn't really know any other working moms actually. So when summer came, I was at a loss on how to balance the kids being home and my work schedule. I heard someone say, one of the best things you can do when you're trying to figure out how you're going to do summer break and work, is to ask other parents. But I didn't have any.

So this episode is dedicated to anyone who's not really sure who to go ask and who needs some guidance now that all of my kids are in high school. This episode is dedicated to you mamas trying to figure out how this is all going to work. I'm going to share with you what I've tried. I'm going to tell you what worked. I'm going to tell you what definitely did not and failed. I'm going to share about the mom guilt and the frustration when it didn't work. And I'm going to share about how good it felt when it did, and the actual tangible steps that I took to make that work for me.

And we're going to really take this in two different areas. We're going to look at the philosophical, and we're going to also take a very tangible approach. So we need to start by asking and knowing how do you set yourself up for success? Okay. That's going to be the tangible, but what is success? And that is the philosophical. So how are we going to set it up? We're going to talk all about that. But you need to know what success looks like. And I'm going to say it later, but I'm going to say it now. Is success really how much work you can get done during the summer, or is it how many memories and moments you capture with your kiddos? We'll come back to that, but I'm going to just set that in there right now.

So this episode is for a listener. Her name is Carly Joe and she sent me a DM. I tell you guys to do this, I hope you will. What do you want to hear me talk about? What do you need help with? How can I help you balance the busy? Well, Carly Joe is incredible. And she DM'd me and she said, okay, anticipating this summer when you work from home or run a small business from home and being able to balance my work and my kids. She shared vulnerably that she struggled so much last summer feeling like she wasn't doing a good job. So, Carly Jo, this is for you.

All right, let's dig in.

Why Summer Has to Look Different

First things first. When it comes to summer, we cannot expect things to look the same. So we have to accept, better yet, embrace that things are going to look different than they do September through June or whatever your school year is.

Now, I know that seems probably obvious to almost all of you, but it wasn't for me. I don't know why I thought that I was just going to make my same work routines, schedules, the same expectations that I was going to just get them to fit into summer, that it's not advisable and it didn't work. So we have to start there.

The first year, I really did try to act like everything was going to be as normal, aka the same way it looked while they were in school, and it ended in tears, both mine and theirs. There was too much screen time. I was behind on deadlines. There was so much stress and guilt. I mean, it felt horrible. It didn't feel like summertime. And, you know, all the happy, fun feelings. We feel it. It felt like more stress, more weight.

What Improved in Year Two

So move on to year two. And I did get it a little better. I planned a little earlier for summer activities, getting them into camps and different things like that. And I simplified some of the big pain points. I'll get into more of these, but one of them was dinner time. Uh, just creating simpler dinners. So I'm talking summer dinner menus that were fast and easy, and they were on rotation over and over again. I was not needing to rethink this.

The easiest of them being really and truly like the Costco rotisserie chicken. And it was either a top Asian salad and I like fancy it up by adding a can of mandarin oranges, some cilantro, and those little crunches. Or it was even simpler. And it was the rotisserie chicken atop the Costco Caesar salad. And that is dinner once a week, sometimes two times a week. I mean, that can be done in ten minutes.

What Changed in Year Three

And then in year three, that's when I really, really feel like I got good at this. So I started looking for simplifying. I started looking for cutting things down a little bit and preparing myself to be able to do that. But year three, that's, that's when I got better at this.

I, it did take a while, so I hope I cut out some of some of the pain of it taking longer for you. I started creating summer work hours. That was one of the first things that really made a huge difference. They were more limited and they were more adaptable. I sometimes chose working early in the morning before the kids even got up. Other times, it might look like asking hubby to take over the nighttime routine so that I could do work in the evenings a bit, but just being willing to shift everything around and change it up and make it less.

I mean, my schedule dramatically shrinks during summer, so how that works, especially as I shared many of these years, the years when my kids were little. So they're home for summer and they are very needy during the summer. I was either the sole provider or the primary provider. So my husband was either still in graduate school or he was just starting his practices. Whatever was happening during that time, it was on me. So if you're saying like, Leah, I can't step back, I need to pay the bills, I get it. That was me also, and here is how I did it.

Front Stacking Before Summer

And I want to just I want to say I'm going to talk to you about I started front stacking. And there is a reason that this episode is publishing in April. And I'm sorry to those who your school is going to end in May. I'm in Washington. We're not out of school till June. So this is a little bigger window, but you need to do some work. You need to get in schedule some real good blocks of time to front stack so that you're ready for summer.

So here's what I would tell you. This is the tangible do as much now as you can. These are the things that are not urgent right now, but they are so important in order to create the summer, the experience with your kids that you want. So if you listen to our episode that was all about brain dumps and using the Eisenhower metric, you're going to recognize number two is important, but not urgent. These are those kind of things.

So I started Pre-scheduling back in those days, it was blog content and YouTube videos that I was really working on. So I was batching out tons of blog content and trying to get them all completely done and scheduled through summertime. It was things like newsletters and today it still would be. But right now it's looking like my newsletters. It's looking like my podcast. So we are heavily stacking interviews for the last couple of weeks and going on for another couple weeks so that I will have podcasts scheduled, the interview portions, all completely scheduled all the way through the end of September, or maybe it's early October. And that's all going to be done because summer is coming and I want to be able to really pull back.

It takes intention. It takes me sitting down and prioritizing and saying, I'm not going to get distracted. I'm going to do these things. I'm going to carve out blocks of time. I'm going to schedule it, but doing as much as I can. Front stacking, front loading, doing the work now is going to make it so I'm so much more available in the summer.

What Not to Take On

Next is limiting the projects and the big things that you take on during the summer. If you're thinking about developing a course, you're thinking about building a giant summit, starting a podcast, writing a book. Summertime is maybe not the ideal time to do this. I'm just going to be honest. Maybe it needs to wait until September when the kids are back in school, because part of you might be thinking, oh, this is a great time. Everyone's home, but everyone's home. And is that really where you want to be? Or would you rather be with them?

And my third suggestion for you is setting an auto responder. Actually setting an email signature that says, I'm in summer hours. I'm spending extra time with my kids. Right now, I'm only checking my inbox two times a week and just making it very, very clear that you are limited right now. And of course, that means it is not the time to take on, you know, the big last minute urgent project that's probably going to be a really hard client or whatever it might look like in your business, in your world.

Build the Summer Around Family First

Another thing I really want to suggest is creating a summer schedule. So looking at and thinking about what you want your summer to look like. We start our summer schedule by looking at the fun that we want to have. First, we sometimes create summer bucket lists, and sometimes it's just a matter of saying, okay, what vacations do we want to do? What activities do we want to do? Let's drop all of those into the calendar first. Let's put all those in now and then work is going to fit in where it can, but we're not going to compromise the experiences as a family for the workload.

Instead, during summer hours, we're going to compromise the workload for the family experiences. And I'm not saying that, you know, we make it so we can't pay our bills. That's why we're doing things like front stacking. That's why maybe you take on extra client or two before the kids get out of school to make up for this season where you're pulling back when the kids are home.

I started preparing for summer way before summer came, and that's really how I started to actually be able to enjoy my kids being home, making memories with them, having time, but not having this feeling in the background nonstop. That was there's things to do. You've got to get to work. When are you going to get this done? You're on deadline. What's happening? Ha. You know that stress that frazzled. We want to go from frazzled to fulfilled. We want to go from chaos to calm. And this is how I was able to create more and more of that and truly enjoy summers.

Practical Tips That Helped

Now, here are some other tips that I've learned over the years that have really helped me. One of them is family council. So sitting down as a family and talking with everybody kids, hubby, partner all the people and establishing when your hours are going to be and how you're going to make them happen.

I even at this point, this was a gift from my husband. Taylor got this for me. I have a light on the outside of my office door now, so if it's green, everybody knows they can come in. If it's red, it means you cannot come in right now. I just set it from my computer and it makes it so that, you know, especially if my kids were little, I would have loved having that because they would have been like, oh, the red light. That means we have to be really quiet. And I would have created a whole special contest like, oh, if you guys do really good and I can't hear you when the red lights on, then that means you get a special. I would have come up with something. Maybe they got points and then that earned some activity or I don't know. I definitely would have gotten really creative around that. Um, I had things like that. I just didn't have anything as special as a light on my door when they were little. I don't think it probably existed, but get creative, figure out how you're going to make this work.

Use screen time, but use it for your advantage. It's not about setting our kids in front of our screen indefinitely. Here's the number one reason it's bad for them. Okay, that's the actual number one reason. Here's the number two reason it becomes ineffective. You know what I'm talking about. If you give them too much screen time, they then start getting bored by screen time and they're walking off. They have completely lost interest. It's not doing what you needed it to do, which was to keep their attention while you needed to get something done.

So I would save screen time until I really needed it, and then I would be like, okay, this is your time. You get to have this amount. Set a timer. And then that helped me to really get what I needed to get done, done, and then come back and be able to be present again.

Also, let them be bored. I have this saying I've said their whole life, which is you can't be bored unless you're boring. They hate when I say it, but there's many a summers where they would be like, mom, we're bored. I'd be like, can't be bored unless you're boring. And that was their sign. I'm not going to help you with this. Go find something to do another time.

Something we did is we created a bored bucket list. So it was all these ideas of things you could do when you're bored. They we came up with all of it together. One day. They came up with most of it and then it was on the fridge, something like that. But they could go check it. So if they were feeling bored, I'd say, oh, go look at the list. And they could look for something that looked fun. And sometimes they'd be like, none of it looks good. Okay, well, you can't be bored unless you're boring. And you know, they'd wait until that creative juices finally kicked in and they came up with something to do.

Reading Goals and Rewards

Another thing we did is we set reading goals during the summer. So this was great because again, you might be able to use screen times for a little bit. Maybe you, you know, do one hour of screen time or one movie screen time. And then you also have reading time and you're like, hey, it's going to be quiet time, forty five minutes. You try to make it a little special, maybe fun pillows and, uh, yummy drinks or, I don't know, like lemonade, something kind of fun.

But we had reading time too. And we set that with a reward system, which was they got money for every book they read. It was a dollar, two dollars, something like that. But while the kids were were in older elementary school for several years, we were going to Disneyland every September. So we started our reading challenge at the very beginning of summer. And then however many books they read, they got a dollar or two dollars per book, and then they got to spend that in Disneyland. So that became their way to earn their spending money. When we went to Disneyland in September.

This is not me saying you should go to Disneyland in September, although you should. It's a really good time to go. This is me telling you, get creative. Figure out how you could make a reward system that helps your kids be excited about reading and doing these different things.

Outsourcing and Getting Help

And of course, we can't have this episode without talking about the idea of getting external help outsourcing. Maybe that looks like actually paying someone to help you. Maybe you happen to have a family member or a friend that you could ask to help one day a week. Maybe it's a trade. You got to make sure that's actually working for you though. Because if you end up having to be all in watching their kids, it's not serving you. And that's probably not worth your time.

One year we did pay someone, so most of the years we did not live close enough to family for them to be able to help. And one year we had a nanny who lived with us for the summer. She had been our babysitter through all of her high school years. And then we had recently moved away. We were in a bigger city. Now she was getting ready to go to college, and she came and stayed with us for the summer to be able to just experience something new. And she would help in the morning. So she got the kids up, she got them to their swim lessons and did those activities, played with them a little bit, made lunch, then I came out at lunchtime. We all had lunch together and then played from there together.

So it was great because I got up a little bit before the kids, and it gave me a really good chunk of time to get my work done in a few hours in the morning, and then I had the whole rest of the day to play with them and be fully present.

Final Reflection

There are so many things that we can do to make summer be something that we really enjoy, something that feels good and works for us. And I'm going to say most of it is going to rest on getting organized and doing some work early to set yourself up for success, But let me just say this. You have seventeen summers. Eighteen, if you're really lucky. The first three, they really can't remember. And the last three, they're going to have their own social lives, activities, possibly even jobs. So how are you going to make the most of these summers that you have?

Here's what I would honestly do different if I could do it again. And I'm not saying it in a regret way I try not to regret. But being that this is it for me that my oldest is eighteen and she's going off to college and summers are looking very, very different. Here is how I would have changed things if I could from one mama to another. I would automate more. I would work less. I would say no to the last minute clients. I would let myself miss the deadline before I missed time with them. I'd go to the park. I'd set up the outdoor movie night. I'd eat more picnics, even if it was just the Costco rotisserie chicken on top of the Costco Caesar salad. I'd plan more, and I'd realize sooner that time is our most precious commodity.

You can make more money. Money is always out there. It's always available. You only have so much time. And as one mama who is truly running out of time, running out of summers with her kids, that is what I would change.

So I hope that this episode helps you both from a philosophical, personal perspective of be present, be there, make the memories. It's worth it. You will never regret that. And a tangible. Here's how we still. Make sure that we cover the mortgage and pay for food and all those things.

Please share this episode with another mama who is working. We need each other's help. I did not know these things and it was so hard figuring it out. So share this with the women in your life that you love and that you care about, who are also trying to figure out how the heck to manage summer vacation when the kids are home.

I'll see you next week. And here is to the most incredible summer yet.