Practicing Gratitude, with Autumn McKay – TPW311

In this week's episode, Autumn and I talk about mom guilt, practicing gratitude, and keeping our kids engaged and happy in a fun, low-prep way, all while dealing with hectic schedules and time constraints. (And check out the link below for her free gift for The Productive Woman community!)



Practicing gratitude -  and keeping your child(ren) engaged and learning

Autumn McKay has a degree in Early Childhood Education and has been certified to teach in several states, where she has taught both in the classroom and as an online teacher. After her first son was born, she wanted to be involved in helping him learn and grow, so she began to develop color lessons to help engage his developing mind. Autumn also wanted to help other moms dealing with hectic schedules and constant time restraints.

These activities evolved into her first book, Toddler Lesson Plans: Learning Colors. She has continued to create many more books for preschoolers including Learning Numbers Workbook, Learning ABC’s Workbook: Print and Precursive, Learning Preschool Math Workbook, Learning Kindergarten Math Workbook, and Learning 1st Grade Math Workbook. 

Autumn has a passion for helping moms be able to educate their children in a fun, low-prep way that she shares on BestMomIdeas.com.

She lives with her husband and 3 children (ages 6, 4, and 3) in the state of Georgia, here in the U.S., where she enjoys spending time with her family and reading nonfiction books that help her think outside the box.

A typical day

A typical day for Autumn starts at 4:30 in the morning when she wakes up with her husband. He goes off to exercise while Autumn uses these early morning hours to work in the quiet without distractions.

After a while, the children wake up and Autumn puts her work away so she can focus on them. She prepares their breakfasts and gets the two oldest children off to school. If the children are going to be learning from home that day, Autumn will have them begin their school assignments after breakfast while she provides an activity for her youngest child.

They have lunch and playtime later on in the day and then take a nap from 1:00-3:00. Autumn uses this time to get a little more work done.

After this time Autumn will get in a workout, make dinner, and then end the evening by spending time with her family.

Because she gets up so early, Autumn goes to bed around 8:00 pm in order to ensure she is fully rested and can be productive the next day.

Biggest productivity challenges

One of Autumn's biggest challenges is coping with mom guilt. Any time she has a work task that needs to get done outside of her normal working hours, such as an email that needs to go out, she feels guilty for not focusing on her children, since that was her original goal in working from home. She deals with this by explaining to the children that she will only be attending to these work tasks for a specific amount of time, and then the rest of the time is for them to do whatever they would like. She finds that when she explains the situation to them and reminds them that this is unusual and a special circumstance, they don't feel put aside. However, it's beneficial for children to see that moms are human beings who have other interests and responsib...