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Coffee Break: Crosby Nylon Business Tote

coach-nylon-business-toteThis nylon business tote from Coach is in the men's section of 6pm, but I see no reason why women wouldn't wear it. (It's 15″ x 5″ x 13.5″, which doesn't seem crazy large; the shorter straps are 7.5″ long.) It looks lightweight but structured, has tons of great storage (and a zipper on top, huzzah!), comes with a detachable crossbody strap, and is marked down — it was $368, but is now marked to $199. COACH Crosby Nylon Business Tote This $50 tote is similar; it's one of the several we rounded up a month or two ago for our Hunt for professional totes for work. (L-all)

Sales of note for 12.5

And some of our latest threadjacks here at Corporette (reader questions and commentary) — see more here!

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241 Comments

  1. Help! I am about to start the process of furnishing a newly constructed house and I have no idea where to start Where are the good places to buy furniture? I haven’t quite identified my style just yet, so I am trying to look at a variety of stores. I know I don’t like what I would call a “rustic” look, but other than that, I am starting from scratch. TIA!

    1. You can buy furniture anywhere and everywhere. I would start by looking at Macys and Ethan Allen, as they both have a variety of styles as well as an in-house designer who may be able to offer guidance.

      1. At a lower price point, Target, of all places, has a lot of really fun accent pieces at great prices.

        1. +1 I just got a fun lamp and an entry way cabinet from Target. I’ve had great luck with accent pieces from them.

      2. I would advise against Macys (at least for upholstered pieces). The prices are high relative to the quality. I bought a fairly expense chair there that was literally falling apart within 2 years.

    2. I gave this advice a couple weeks ago. Start a pinterest board and look at different websites and pin things that appeal to you. You’ll likely notice themes starting to appear and it’ll give you an idea of what you like. It’ll also give you an idea of how much things cost and you can determine how much you are willing to spend on something. Places to look online at various price points: Macy’s, Ethan Allen (like EM said), Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn (though this is more of a rustic style you said you didn’t like), Restoration Hardware, Wayfair, Haverty’s, Star, even Ikea for certain things, etc. Maybe try stores that are in your area too so if you fall in love with something, you can go see it in person. You could also try furniture consignment stores but they can be hit or miss.

      Also, I would focus on just one room and figure it out. Trying to furnish and decorate an entire house is daunting.

      1. This is good advice.

        I know it seems overwhelming but I’m actually a little jealous … our home is a hodgepodge of things we’ve accumulated over the years and nothing really goes together. You have the chance to buy exactly what you want and create your own look! I keep thinking about selling/donating much of our stuff and starting over, but I can’t justify the expense.

      2. I second the idea to check out Pinterest. Houzz dot com is another fantastic resource.

        Almost everything in the house I remodeled and decorated a couple of years ago was copied from one of those sources (with the help of a designer) and it turned out fantastically well.

    3. For modern furniture, I love Room + Board. It’s pricey but the quality is unbeatable.

    4. When I was decorating my house, I really loved “The Perfectly Imperfect Home” – it’s a book about how to put rooms together in a way that doesn’t look like you just bought page 57 from the Pottery Barn catalog, and it was really helpful for me when I was trying to design whole rooms from scratch.

      For each room, start with one piece that really makes you happy – a great couch in the living room, for instance, or a cool light fixture for the dining room, or whatever. Design the rest of the room around that piece. Also, don’t feel like you have to be rigid about your “style” – focus on picking things that you like that don’t clash with each other, and you’ll end up developing your own personal style organically.

    5. Also check out craigslist offerings in your area. I’ve found some great mid-century modern pieces for next to nothing.

  2. I just had a recruiter cold call me at my desk, on my office line, wanting to talk to me about an open position (at a competitor no less!). He said he saw my LinkedIn profile and wanted to talk. I have no idea how he got my phone number – my number isn’t sequential to anyone elses, so it’s not as simple as dialing down the line. I’m not listed online in anyway but for LinkedIn, which doesn’t include any contact info. I don’t know why that bothered me so much, but I really didn’t like getting contacted on my office phone line! /rant

    1. This happens all the time in law. I’d either ask for a number/email where I can reach them or tell them to use my personal number/email. They are usually happy to move to a more discreet form of communication.
      I have had some recruiters pretend that they were a friend/colleague when my phone is being answered by someone else. I thought that was a little sketchy and told them so.

    2. probably via dialing another number at your org and asking the person who answered to look you up in the internal directory.

    3. If I had a $1 for every time this happened.

      Because I’m not currently looking I just say “Thank you for calling, but I’m not interested [in hearing about any opportunities]” (depending on who is nearby and can hear the conversation).

      If I am looking I say “Now is not a good time. Please contact me [online/via email/on my cell/through LinkedIn]” (depending on who is nearby and can hear the conversation).

      1. This is the first time it’s happened, which is why it’s so shocking I suppose. I’m in ‘high finance’ and get contacted all the time on LinkedIn or with emails to my work account even (much easier to figure that out). But the cold call to my desk, in my cube farm, super caught me off guard!

    4. I’m in med device regulatory and it happens all the time (starting about 2 months after I got hired). And my office phone number isn’t listed publicly as far as I know. I think there is a switchboard/general number they can call and will get transferred, but otherwise I just go with “no thanks”.

    5. This happens at least twice a month. But honestly, your phone number should be out there. Do you want clients being able to call you??

  3. Good afternoon fellow over-achieving chicks,

    I’m back on the dating scene after some time away and wondering – how important was/is it to you to find a partner in a similar professional situation, either in terms of field or intensity? For example – lawyer/lawyer (same field), doctor/lawyer (similar intensity, let’s say, of work obligations). Or conversely, did you have a preference for someone outside of your field and with a different work situation than yours? How has this similarity or difference affected your relationship?

    I’m asking this out of curiosity and interested in hearing perspectives.

    1. I wasn’t too specific, but wanted someone who took pride in his work and was driven to do a good job. I’m a lawyer and can work some crazy hours so I wanted someone who would be ok with that. I was open to dating someone who worked similar hours to me but wound up meeting my husband who is a bureaucrat and works 35 hours a week. He’s great at his job and really enjoys it most of the time. It has been fantastic because he totally understands my hours (we started dating when I was regularly working 70 hour weeks) and is willing to do more household stuff so I don’t have to when I’m working a lot.

      1. “I wasn’t too specific, but wanted someone who took pride in his work and was driven to do a good job.”

        Same here. I wasn’t looking for a specific professional bent (or even white collar vs blue collar), but I did seek out someone who was diligent, responsible, capable, etc in personal and professional life.

        My other requirement was that they be stable and happy in their career. I don’t hold a grudge against anyone looking to transition or is currently in school – but at that time of my life, *I* needed someone who was where they wanted to be.

        Now that I really think about it, I do think I unconsciously looked outside of my career. But my now-husband and I really clicked on our first date when we realized that we could discuss each other’s careers with genuine interest, even though we really didn’t know anything about the other’s field. That has played out well for our marriage. (Neither of us are law, fwiw).

      2. I have a similar situation (SO is a creative, works flexible hours, and gets to wear fun clothes all the time) and it works really well, but it only works that well because SO knew what my career would look like and because their priorities are more home oriented. I don’t know that I was 100% intentional about this from the beginning, but now realize anyone different (another high hour/high pace person) would have been deadly for me.

        1. I forgot to add that SO is incredibly hard working and recognized in their field, so the #1 priority for me was finding someone who was self-sufficient, driven, and who had goals. It was just an added bonus that SO wants to be primary care giver in the future + takes care of the home.

    2. As part of a biglaw lawyer (me)- midlaw lawyer (him) marriage, in retrospect, it has caused a lot of stress and strain to have us both in very busy, very demanding careers, but mine even more so, and also one where my career pays three times what his does. A *lot.*

      I really do see why many of my high-powered colleagues (men) like to marry teachers or people in other less overtime, less weekend work, less emergency project careers. There’s no question at that point about whose career takes precedence, and also no question about who is going to shoulder more domestic/home chores, because one of you is working a lot more and getting paid a lot more than the other one.

      This is particularly the case when there’s kid(s) in the picture.

      I’m sure someone in the flip side of my situation would tell me that I’m actually wrong. This is probably a grass is greener situation, but a dual lawyer home is really, really hard, and making thrice what my husband does inadvertently and forcefully bangs up against all sorts of internalized and overtly held gender role issues for both of us.

      1. I think is totally personal and hard to generalize, as I am part of a two-lawyer couple and I love it. We have different practice areas, but similar firm sizes and demands. Neither one of us can take precedence all the time career-wise and there’s a lot of negotiation and juggling, but it works for us. It definitely depends on the couple and how, well, modern and open-minded the guy is.

      2. I’m in a two-lawyer couple. It was harder when we were both in Biglaw, mostly because our schedules so rarely aligned – if one of us had a slow period, the other almost always was super busy, so it was hard to schedule time to spend together. Now I’m in small law and work much fewer hours so we can enjoy times when he’s not super busy. More of the housework now falls to me because I’m home more, but I don’t mind since I have the time and he is responsible for a lot of the tasks I hate, like bug-killing :) I also don’t feel “lesser” or like my career isn’t important, because I still make about 75% of what he makes (and probably make more on a per-hour basis). We have a kid on the way though, so we’ll see if that stays true.

      3. My first husband was an elementary school teacher (I was in BigLaw) and it was really great to have one parent with shorter hours and summers off. I can’t imagine how two people with big careers manage the early child-rearing years. I do agree, though, that the salary differential can bit you in the butt if you’re not careful.

        1. Oh, and my new Lovely Husband is a lawyer — first lawyer I’ve ever dated! It’s fun to be able to talk shop, and at this point we are both nearing retirement and the grind isn’t so grind-y for either of us.

    3. I’m a lawyer and I’ve never dated or been attracted to lawyers. There are of course individual exceptions, but a lot of the male lawyers I know are macho bros who aren’t cool with ambitious women. Many of the guys in my law school class were physically attractive, but as soon as they opened their mouths, they lost all their appeal. I also think that I’m competitive and might have a problem having a partner in the same field, unless we were at very different stages of our careers or wanted to do totally different things.

      My husband is a scientist with a PhD and it’s worked out great for us. We both care about our careers a lot and are ambitious, but neither of us is terribly money-driven and our personalities are a good fit (I’m a Type-A, hyper-organized planner while he is much more low-key and laid back but not great at organizational/planning stuff). And he works fairly reasonable hours and has a lot of flexibility which meant that he was able to shoulder the vast majority of the cooking, cleaning and pet care when I was working in Big Law (I’m in house now with a basically 9-6 schedule so chore division is much more equitable now). Neither of us plans to be a stay at home parent, but he is going to be the “primary parent” when we have kids (e.g., the person who stays home to take a sick kid to the doctor when necessary) because of his flexible schedule. I want kids but don’t really have a lot of interest in taking on the primary parent role that is often assigned to the mother so that’s another thing that makes us compatible.

      1. lawyer married to a science PhD as well – I like the balance and perspective we bring to each other.

        2. adding that I think it works because it forces you to realize that there are lots of different kind of smart in the world.

          1. I love that my husband and I are both smart in different ways. He likes to talk things through with me to get a logical perspective and I like to talk things through with him to get the historical context. I call him my personal Wikipedia because he retains so much specific information about things like history. That difference is really fun to me.

      2. Yup, I never really wanted to date/marry lawyers either (although I did date a few fellow law students). My DH is a tech guy and is also not good at organization/planning.

        I am the primary parent, though, since he works more hours than I do and has a weird schedule.

      3. My parents are the reverse of that – mom is a science professor and my dad is a lawyer and they’ve always said it worked really well for them.

      4. Ha – lawyer married to a lawyer here & we both had a rule about never dating lawyers (let alone having relationships with them) before we met each other. I totally get staying away, but for us, having the same profession has led to a level of understanding that neither of us has ever had before. Both in terms of the stress and also, we can actually talk meaningful shop.

    4. Happily married BigLaw partner, but if I were to be dating again, I would likely be on farmersonly dot com. Another lawyer, unless it was someone who was ramping down in life (many firms start wanting you to cycle out in your mid-50s and if I make it that long, I will likely want to do that). I don’t want to add to my crazy right now. Farmers, mentally, sound about my speed. Towns with just a few traffic lights. A place I’d like to spend lazy weekends. And boots. Lots of boots.

      1. Don’t marry a farmer if you’re looking for lazy weekends or a slower pace. Most could go toe-to-toe with y’all in BigLaw in terms of hours and stress.

        1. I posted that and I totally agree. All 4 grandparents farmed and my father was born on a farm and the first thing I ever drove was a tractor. 2 grandparents also had supplemental off-the-farm jobs. Grandmothers picked and put up preserves. And fed the workers lunch every day.

          It is a different sort of work that grinding away at BigLaw. I am 100% pro-work. I guess it’s different if you’re closer to the sky? Maybe it eliminates the gunners and the awfulness that is BigLaw? Or the boots?

          [That said, we’re plant farmers, not livestock / ranchers. I’m OK with plants. I’d feel out of my depth with lots of animals.]

        2. I definitely agree that it’s a very different type of work. I was just home for harvest and MAN, it felt good. But it’s definitely a grass is greener sort of thing and I had to remind myself I left the farm for a reason.

          Humorous that you mentioned Grandmothers picking preservers. After 25 years of being stereotypically in the house as a farmwife, my Mom is now running machinery. Now I just need to convince her to hire out the housework.

    5. Lawyer and my SO is a teacher. It works really well for us. Although I am sometimes a bit jealous of his schedule, it helps that SOMEONE can get home at a reasonable time to cook, clean, etc.

      1. Two of the female partners in my office are married to teachers. It seems to work SO well for them as well.

        1. Two of the female partners in my office are married to teachers. It seems to work SO well for them as well.

    6. Lawyer here. When I was dating, I didn’t factor in type of profession when considering guys. I only considered whether they were stably employed and seemed to enjoy their job.

      That being said, every guy I dated seriously as an adult ended up being involved in STEM in some way and almost all of them had jobs with less demanding hours.

      I ended up marrying a guy in a sales position with a company doing STEM product development. His outgoing, charismatic personality (sales) and mechanical and engineering driven mind (STEM) were the perfect complementary fit to my semi-introverted, reserved personality and analytical, literal mind.

    7. I’m currently pursuing a firefighter. He’s not as smart as me or as well educated as me, but he’s driven, dedicated, kind, involved in his community, makes me laugh, and I wanna grab his tush. We’ll see I guess!

      1. I dated a firefighter and he was so nice and a really, really good guy. He was smart, dedicated, driven, and just an all around good dude. Not the right dude for me, but I wouldn’t have hesitated to set him up with any of my friends!

    8. Lawyer here. Always thought it was important to be similar professionally. Was in 10-15 awful relationships before I found my love who is a maintenance/construction guy (with a college degree he doesn’t use). His personality, background, values, family, sense of humor, and similar work ethic were why I was like OMG why have I been dating lawyers and accountants? (plus he is hawt)

      I will say different hours makes it hard to date nurses or bartenders (for me) but his are similar and it’s nice to wake up together and get home around the same time.

      I feel bad for saying this but we met through friends so I knew my friends vouched for him as being a really good person. I don’t know if I would have given him a chance if we had met somewhere else. He has since told me he probably wouldn’t have dated a lawyer unless his friends said the same though.

      Also his set of problem solving is so much different than mine it blows my mind. I could never look at a kitchen and see something other than like cleaning up a mess or like yeah I do not like the sink to be so far from the stove and fridge. But he’s like my boss won’t give me a raise and I will say ASK. And he is like oh, that never occurred to me. And it’s really, really nice to have someone who can fix things that knows how!

    9. I’m a lawyer married to an engineer. Although, we got married while I was in law school so I hadn’t started my career yet. It works out really well for us. Our minds work very differently, but in complementary ways. (I can plan and organize things, while he can fix anything.) When our kids were younger, he was the “primary parent” and worked on a part-time contract basis. But now that our youngest is in kindergarten, he has returned to full-time, outside the house work. However, because he was home with the kids in those early years it allowed me to really build up a good reputation at my job and now that he is working more hours than me, I have the freedom to set my own schedule, work from home when necessary, etc. It has also really helped that we have the same overall goals and ideas on what we want our life to look like and that he was not intimidated by his wife making more money than him.

    10. This wasn’t important to me at all. Long term partner is a quality control specialist and autoworker at a manufacturing plant. He graduated from college, though, which WAS a requirement for me. His job title and his standing at his job aren’t important to our relationship at all.

    11. I thought I wanted someone in a career with similar intensity/status-in-other-people’s-eyes as mine. And then I met an incredibly s*xy dude who worked in retail, so I started dating him “for fun” and then realized he was, in addition to being s*xyAF, a profoundly decent person who supported and grounded me and shared my values… and now we’re married and he’s the SAHD for our kid.

    12. My happiest lawyer female lawyer friend is with a massage therapist/snow board instructor. Together for 20 years.

    13. When dating, I looked for someone who I felt a strong intellectual connection with; who enjoyed talking about his job and hearing about mine; who made enough money to support a standard of living similar to mine; and who didn’t mind me working long hours when needed.

      I’m a extroverted policy lawyer and am definitely attracted to more introverted, highly analytical minds (architects, engineers, etc.). In my experience, what’s important to me is not my partner’s profession but our shared values (or lack thereof).

      I was married in my 20s to someone who gave me endless crap about working long hours, and it made the job even more miserable. Compare and contrast with my wonderful now-husband who helped me through biglaw with not a single complaint about my odd hours and would happily make me dinner if I was working late.

      1. This is word for word what I look for.

        I’m also a lawyer. I wind up with lawyers (I mean, proximity….), engineers, consultants, jobs oriented towards infrastructure/environmental science/land planning.

    14. Lawyer — my SO has a masters in geophysics, and we met online.

      I’ve had several 6 monthsish long relationships with men I met online, and I never cared so much specifically _what_ they did so much as that I found their conversation interesting and intelligent. For me that means I tended to filter out anyone without a college degree, but beyond that I didn’t really care what career path they chose or what the degree was in or whether they had anything beyond undergrad. I cared that they had their sh*t together and weren’t man-children way more than I cared about career paths.

    15. I’m a scientist and the spouse is a tech geek. He’s been working in tech since he was 14 and got a waiver to work in a computer repair shop after school. He doesn’t have much in the way of a formal education, but his extensive experience level has meant that his employers have been happy to ignore that so far.

      We’re both somewhat detail-oriented people, but we’re also very different. He’s much more extroverted than I am, for one thing! It was important to me to find someone who was intelligent, though I wasn’t too concerned how their intelligence presented. I like that we’re in different fields because we can tell each other about our days without it being too familiar, and we both learn things about the other person’s world. I know more about coding by proxy than I would ever know otherwise, and he can speak intelligently about my chosen field of science with my coworkers if he wants to.

      I found this “who marries whom?” chart awhile ago and was amused to see that yes, female biological scientists tend to marry male software developers. http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-who-marries-whom/

    16. I know I’m way too late for anyone to see this, but I’m an academic and was (unhappily) married to a highly educated man (master’s in urban policy, Ph.D. in clinical psychology) for almost ten years. The problem, for me, was that he wasn’t passionate about anything. He wasn’t passionate about his work or really much of anything (including me). When I met my current SO, he was a high ranking cop, then he was promoted to administration. Despite the fact that he never finished college, we were both doing really similar administrative work (supervising people and complex budgeting). And, he was very passionate about his work, always had been. We are a much better match, despite the disparity in education.

  4. Just to be clear before I dive into my comment, I am not voting for Trump. I am a Republican in a red state. Many of my friends are not voting for him also.

    BUT I will say this: I think if Democrats had a similarly terrible candidate, like Sean Penn or something, they would be having the same struggles as many Republicans are having. Because if it were Sean Penn versus an actual Republican (which Trump is not!), you would say, well, I can’t vote for someone who would put women’s rights back, or who would blah blah blah, and I don’t like Sean Penn, but I really believe in those issues. Some of you would decide not to vote for him in the end, but I think you would at least struggle with it and see much of the same division in your party.

    1. I find this comment confusing.

      Are you trying to say it’s not surprising that lifelong Republicans are struggling with voting for a Democrat? That’s not exactly surprising.

      However, the reality is DJT has expressed horrendously offensive positions for a very long time now and many many Republicans have gotten over that struggle by recognizing how far gone his positions are (e.g. jailing your political opponents after the FBI says there is no basis for charges). This is not politics as usual. I’m pretty sure John McCain or either George Bush ever called their opponent the devil or said they had a hate filled heart.

        1. But that’s your problem – this wasn’t bad luck that it happened to the Republican party and not the Democrats. The Republican party has been building towards this for years – e.g. Tea party stuff. So yeah, it wasn’t just the ‘grace of God’ that HRC was the Democratic candidate.

        3. Actually, there but for the grace of our primary voters go us, if you want to get real about it.

          DJT didn’t descend from the sky as the divinely-appointed nominee, your party *chose* him, through the primary process, because he got the most votes from your voters. The fact that you’re (collective Republican “you”) acting like this is a thing that was somehow done to your party instead of something your party basically created by playing, for YEARS, to the extreme right wing to drum up replacement voters for the moderates you’ve continued to lose in droves by failing to respond to the changing face of this country is ridiculous.

          Your party created and fed and raised up a monster. Own it and/or fight to change it, but don’t pretend it’s just this weird inexplicable thing that happened that has nothing to do with you and was equally as likely to happen to Democrats, because it isn’t. It’s a direct result of everything your party has done for the last decade or more to try to hang on to some 1950s version of the status quo at the expense of everyone other than cis-het white men.

      2. When did you start going to local GOP meetings saying that you were tired of the racism? Ten years agoi? Five years ago? The GOP can carry the baby all the way to term.

    2. I think the Dems did have their terrible candidate- Bernie Sanders. But thankfully they have safeguards in place to people like Trump and Bernie could never make it to the podium.

        1. Ok, I laughed out loud. I was obsessed with Scooby Doo as a child and love when people use ruh roh in the right context.

        1. thank you. I have kept my mouth shut for so long on this Bernie thing as my city is still somewhat Berning. Come on people it’s not like it’s an illuminati conspiracy.

      3. Bernie Sanders WAS a terrible candidate. Just because a lot of people like him and his pie-in-the-sky plans doesn’t make him an ideal Democratic candidate.

        1. I think terrible is unfair. #theonlyburnifeelisthefireoffeministrage, but terrible in this context is Trump. Compared to him? Bernie’s awesome.

          1. To each their own, I guess, but I think he was atrocious. “Better than Trump” isn’t exactly a high bar to cross. HRC was the better candidate for us all along.

      4. Yeah, no. Bernie was a great candidate and it’s offensive to compare him to the pile of steaming human feces that is Donald Trump.

        1. Haha, he wasn’t great. Obviously not in the same league as Trump, but get real. He had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning anything.

      5. I am a lifelong Democrat, straight ticket voter. I bitterly resent and and loathe that I have to vote for Hillary Clinton. I pray it’s only for four years. She will sell us all to the highest bidder. No better than Trump, just a more polite facade.

          1. Or Jewish or African-American or homosexual or a woman…Seriously I think straight, white Christian males are the only demographic he has not threatened or derided at this point.

        2. LOL what? So you’re a lifelong Democrat, but you don’t care about a woman’s right to choose? Or LGBT rights? Or addressing income inequality? Climate change? Gun control? Sensible immigration reform? Health care? These are just a handful issues on which Clinton is objectively better than Trump from the Democratic perspective. I can at least understand Republicans who feel the need to hold their noses and overlook Trump’s rhetoric/personality so they can have a candidate with their beliefs appointing Justices but I cannot understand Democrats who say Trump and Clinton are equivalent.

          1. She is a duplicitous war hawk aligned with Wall Street and the 1% getting richer. When you cannot get a job, or afford medical care, take care of your family or maybe even eat — then these other issues just don’t matter so much. I am so terrified of what she and her corrupt administration will do to my country and our citizens. She is merely the least horrible option.

          2. What? Have you looked at their tax plans? She wants to raise taxes on the rich and cut taxes for the lower and middle classes. How is that helping the 1% getting richer? Trump wants to give rich people like himself tax breaks. There are lots of calculators out there from neutral third parties like Tax Policy Institute where you can enter a given income and see what the effects of each of their tax plans would be. Lower/middle class people would be much, much better off under Clinton.

        3. I don’t believe for one second that you’re a lifelong Dem. You’d realize how freaking great HRC is if you were. Nice try, though.

          1. Sorry, I’ve voted a straight Democratic ticket my entire life. I may have been the only person in my state to vote for John Kerry. She is not freaking awesome, I think she is a terrible candidate who will sell out her constituency during her first year.

          3. This is hilarious. I totally don’t believe this person is a Democrat for one second.

    3. I hear you. I think a lot of us on the “other side” do understand that voting for the Democratic candidate is not an easy or automatic choice for Republicans who are opposed to Trump. And we appreciate your willingness to break with the party at this moment when it really is necessary for the future of the country. But those of us with some empathy for that position probably tend to be much quieter about it by nature (as these things usually go) than the usual loudmouths you hear on the news/Facebook/whatever.

      1. I’ve really appreciated establishment Republicans coming forward to say that they wouldn’t be voting for Trump. The ones prior to this last weekend’s debacle. I thought they were providing an example to conflicted Republicans of what can be done. I can’t remember who said it, but they said that they were choosing their country over their party and how that was ok.

    4. But we don’t have a similarly bad candidate, because we aren’t idiots, didn’t nominate one, and didn’t just spend 20 years pandering to bigoted racists.

      1. And, yes. We have a winner.

        Republicans have known for decades that they were playing to this base. And now the base is destroying you.

        1. Exactly. No, I’m not sympathetic. You didn’t just get assigned a psycho, you, and I include all Republicans in this you, created an environment where he succeeded. Meanwhile, Democrats created an environment where a highly qualified and experienced party insider and an inspiring and challenging outsider had a largely civil primary, the candidate most people preferred won, and she’s eminently qualified for the job. Again, we didn’t just luck out.

          2. That’s just not true. We had seventeen candidates, and sixteen of them were qualified. That’s the problem. Nobody had the money or the means to fight Trump directly with ads, etc. Only 25% of Republicans are happy with their candidate. It’s just that those 25% were enough to win enough states that he became impossible to beat.

          3. You had 17 candidates, most of whom you people considered a joke and didn’t vote for, none of who managed to excite the party except an absolute buffoon.

            No one had the money to fight Trump? That’s insance. The Republican Party has its fair share of wealthy doners.

            If you want better next time be better. I still can’t figure out how you blew the last election. Obama’s three biggest vulnerabilities were 1) obamacare, 2) elitist and out of touch, and 3) many Americans vaguely feel he’s of a weird religion. Y’all nominated Mitt Romney? 1) literally the only republican who had a similar healthcare policy to his name, 2) one of the most elite men in the country, 3) with a religion many Americans find vaguely weird.

          4. gee, if only there were a way to limit election spending so people focused on ideas and not who had the flashiest primary ads…..

          5. It may be that only 25% of Republicans are “happy” with him, but the vast majority are voting for him. It doesn’t matter if you’re enthusiastic about him. If you can vote for this guy, you’re part of the problem. Period. Full stop.

          7. “Nobody had the money or the means to fight Trump directly with ads, etc.”

            Are you kidding me?

            And no, the fact that you had 17 candidates does nothing whatsoever to negate the point that your party made its own bed. You’ve been fluffing the pillows for decades. You had a nice cozy Tea Party before sleepy time. Trump was not beamed down from space to f’ up your election year.

          8. Importantly, none of the 16 were willing to put their own ego aside to have the party coalesce around a viable alternative to Trump (if there was one) – at least, not until it was too late.

          9. +1 to January’s point – if “only 25%” wanted Trump, why was he the last man standing? Oh, right, because no one else would back down until it was way, way, way too late. If the Republican Party had consolidated down to 3-5 candidates before or early in the primary season, y’all wouldn’t be where you are today.

            Never mind that all the ads in the world shouldn’t have mattered, because DJT is a racist misogynist narcissist fearmongerer and anyone with half a shred of compassion for other human beings should’ve been repulsed by him from the get-go.

        1. Hey, you’re the ones who can’t figure out how not to be a global laughingstock! The Republican Party has had good leaders and done good things. And you threw it away to pander to evangelicals and racists.

        2. Actually, no, that’s not what’s being said. What’s being said is, your party chose to pander to idiots and extremists instead of working to develop a platform that would actually attract the increasing numbers of young, non-straight, non-white, non-gender-conforming people in this country (and their allies), and now you have to live with the idiots you chose.

        3. I fully agree that the Republican party is in this mess because it pandered to bigotry etc. So I don’t feel sorry for the party at all, and it earned every bit of this. However, I think that it’s unfair to extend this blame to all Republicans. (I do, however, think you’re culpable if you vote for DJT in either the primary or general election) But in an ordinary election cycle, simply voting for a Republican isn’t the same thing as endorsing or contributing to the bigotry etc that the party has fomented over the years.

          Individual Republicans (like all people) are still individuals and it’s just as unreasonable to lump them all together as it is to cast any other group with such a broad brush. Many definitely earned this. Many also didn’t. I think the Party itself as an institution, though, is totally responsible and deserves every bit of this sh*tshow.

          1. To me, though, I think even as an individual Republican (or as an individual Democrat), you have a responsibility to pay attention to what your party is doing and to periodically evaluate whether it’s still the right home for you personally. It’s not a secret that Republicans have been pandering to bigotry and fear and hate for more than a decade. At some point as an individual, you need to step back and say “hey, wait a minute, I did not sign up for this.” Your vote for a Republican is absolutely an endorsement of and contribution to the party’s bigotry – you are telling the party, with your individual vote, that you are on board for what the party is doing, and that you support it.

            I get that it’s uncomfortable to say, because we all know “good Republicans” who “aren’t really racists,” but individual Republicans are not off the hook with me. You either chose to remain willfully ignorant of your party’s chief strategy for building its voter base for more than a decade, or you knew and decided you didn’t care because whatever benefit you were/are getting out of being a Republican is more important to you personally than the massive cultural harm your party is doing by pandering to fear and hate. That’s a choice you’re free to make as an individual, but you have to bear the consequences of that choice, and the consequences of that choice, here, include admitting that you have played a part in the rise of DJT by basically signing off, with every ballot you cast, on the party’s decade-plus strategy of catering to hate because it served your personal interests to do so.

          2. Not every single Republican candidate reflects all of those values though. It’s awfully extreme to say that any vote for any Republican is an endorsement of bigotry.

            I agree that every party member (on both sides) has a responsibility to vote in the primaries though. I can’t disagree much with that. But still, you could be talking to a Republican who did vote (for a non-Trump candidate) in the primaries. I’d say such a person isn’t necessarily responsible for Trump and the current status of the GOP.

      3. The last point is SO important to this conversation.

        You reap what you sow.

        If you’ve been planting the seeds of bigotry and hatred for 20 years and you’ve been fertilizing those seeds with sh1t, you can’t be surprised when a frankenstein monster plant pops out of the dirt.

        To be less colorful – The Republican Party has been leading through fear for a while now. While the Democratic Party was campaigning on hope and change, the Republican Party has been warning its membership about the immigrant, female, transgender, gay, tree-hugging boogie men and making monsters out of the people who disagree with them. With enough time, people were convinced there really was something to be afraid of. And sure, that makes for a manipulable electorate. Protect me, and I’ll vote for you. But you know what else it makes? People who only respond to more fear. And Trump figured that out and he’s capitalizing on it. The people who vote for Trump have been convinced there’s something dangerous lurking in the shadows and Trump validated all of their fears.

    5. You all NEED to get off your high horses, stat.

      First of all, Rodham Clinton is ahead by mere single digits and isn’t crossing the 50% threshold. So stop pretending that your candidate is some sort of amazing rock star, beloved by the American people, while Republicans were alone in nominating someone with high unfavourables. This is despite the FACT that the media is in the tank for her. (Studies show that without the media bias, America would vote like Utah or Kentucky.)

      Second, the Republicans have dominated at the state and local levels in an epic fashion – your precious Democrats have fewer state and local seats than they have since the Great Depression. Obama was the first person since HW Bush to receive a lower percentage of the vote as an incumbent than for his first term. Math, it’s fun!

      Trump has been a Democrat and a Republican through the years. His kids – the Ivanka you all hate – are Democrats. He received $2 billion in free media coverage during the primary season, and, had Rubio dropped out earlier, Cruz would have been leading in the delegate count. Evidence is now coming out that the media pushed Trump because he was the easiest for Clinton to beat. Hundreds of thousands of Democrats re-registered as independents or Republicans to vote for him. Trump did better in open primaries than closed primaries. Seems like he’s also one big, fat Democrat problem.

      You also make hay out of his 2005 comments, but ignore Clinton’s abuse of women over the decades and seemed to not care when Sarah Palin was verbally abused for months on end. (We all remember her being called “c-nt,” “wh0re,” etc., and the rampant speculation that Trig Palin was not her son.)

      When Romney said “binders full of women,” it was apparent to anyone listening and with a functional cerebral cortex that he meant “binders full of women’s resumes,” because he was talking about getting qualified women into top positions in his administration. Yet you all screamed about how sexist that was. (I guess it’s better for Obama to have an administration that pays women 87 cents on the man’s dollar.)

      1. “Studies show that without the media bias, America would vote like Utah or Kentucky.”

        Literally no idea what this means.

      2. I began to respond to this and then realized that anyone suggesting that “evidence is now coming out that the media pushed Trump because he was the easiest for Clinton to beat” is not going to open to rational, honest debate. If you’re looking to impress anyone with these arguments, Infowars will readily call you “queen.”

      3. “…Republicans were alone in nominating someone with high unfavourables.” <— What? That is not even remotely what this is about. This is about the fact that Republicans chose and supported a racist, bigoted, misogynist monster who thinks "build a wall" and "jail my opponent" are completely appropriate policy positions, and who is a blatant opportunist who will say and do anything in service of his own glorification, no matter what collateral damage he may cause.

        But please, continue to console yourself that his candidacy is a "media conspiracy." That totally completely explains everything and completely releases you from any moral responsibility for the damage your party has done and continues to do to everyone who isn't white, straight, male, and Christian.

      4. Your tin foil hat is crooked.

        In Ohio, vast numbers of Democrats I know voted in the Republican primary to vote for Kasich (making Ohio a state Trump didn’t win). I’d love to see this “evidence” coming out that hundreds of thousands of Democrats voted in Republican primaries to get Trump on the ticket.

        I’d be more inclined to rebut your points if you weren’t clearly a conspiracy theorist.

      5. So your quip about Americans voting more like Kentucky or Utah if they were exposed to media without bias didn’t ring a bell, so I did some research. Here’s a quote summarizing what the Washington Post (a conservative paper) *said* the study did:

        “To one set of randomly selected voters in Northern Virginia, the researchers gave trial subscriptions to The Washington Post. To another set, they gave trial subscriptions to The Washington Times. After the subsequent election, the researchers polled their subjects and found that their Post-subscribing subjects voted for the Democrat at a 3.8 percentage higher rate than did the Times-subscribing subjects. That is, the more liberal newspaper truly seemed to cause people to vote more liberally.”

        And here’s a quote from the study itself of what actually happened: (see American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 2009, 1:2, 35–52 http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.1.2.35)

        “We conducted a field experiment to measure the effect of exposure to newspapers on political behavior and opinion. Before the 2005 Virginia gubernatorial election, we randomly assigned individuals to a Washington Post free subscription treatment, a Washington Times free subscription treatment, or a control treatment. We find no effect of either paper on political knowledge, stated opinions, or turnout in post-election survey and voter data. However, receiving *either paper* (EMPHASIS MINE) led to more support for the Democratic candidate, suggesting that *media slant mattered less in this case than media exposure* (EMPHASIS MINE). Some evi- dence from voting records also suggests that receiving either paper led to increased 2006 voter turnout.”

        Read with a critical eye.

        4. That is interesting, but WaPo is definitely not a conservative paper. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Washington Times.

          1. Anon, to clarify, I had meant to type “Times”, but my eyes were crossing after reading about both for so long :-) Thanks for catching my error!

      7. Lol. Yup. And that’s it right there. You’re a crazed conspiracy theorist and Donald is perfect for you.

      9. Also, no one is ignoring Bill Clinton’s behavior. Is it disgusting in my opinion? Yes. Do I like him? No. Do I think he is a sleazeball? Yes. Do I think he is a rapist? Not sure, given the conflicting testimony from some of his supposed victims.

        But he’s not running for President. And to deflect Donald Trump’s behavior (admitted on tape) by screaming Bill Clinton! and Sarah Palin! does nothing to further any of your arguments.

      10. I’m a Democrat who registered in an open Republican primary to vote AGAINST Trump. Many, many of my friends did the same. I have not seen a shred of evidence that supports the idea that Democrats re-registered as Republicans to get Trump elected because he would be easy to beat. Even at the primary stage, many of us were horribly scared of this dangerous demagogue. Believe me I would much rather have had a Clinton-Kasich election even if it resulted in a Kasich win. I like Clinton and am much closer to her on policy issues than I am to Kasich, but I respect both of them and I would much rather have had an election with two sane adults even if it resulted in my preferred candidate not getting elected. Just by getting this close to the White House, Trump has done so much damage to our country and our national security.

        1. I also re-registered Republican to vote against Trump (for Kasich, since I think Cruz is awful, too, and no one else was left by that point).

    6. I’m sympathetic. I appreciate that it’s a difficult to consider voting for a democrat if you’re a principled, non-crazy republican.

      An analogous situation for me would be if vaccine-denier Jill Stein were the democratic candidate and she was running against an establishment republican that I would generally disagree with on most issues (e.g., McCain, or Romney).

      I would feel torn, and likely ultimately vote for the sane republican.

      May be time for Republicans to consider superdelegates.

    7. I’m a Democrat and I agree with you. If it were Karl Rove (Republican) versus Kim Kardashian (Democrat), I would never go out and vote for Kim, but it would be very hard to go out and pull the trigger for Rove.

  5. I like the look of this tote a lot, but I much prefer being able to put both straps over my shoulder. A 7.5″ drop isn’t long enough for me.

    1. +1. It seems like long enough straps for putting over your shoulder are so hard to find these days!

      1. Right?!?! Sometimes I find one that is long enough during the summer only to find out that it won’t work come winter when I pull out my wool coat. It’s frustrating. My current purse had better last forever because the 11″ drop (I think) straps and cross body option are the perfect combo.

  6. Repost from mom’s site – feel free to skip.
    Bit of a friendship vent here. My very dear best friend has 2 kids and so do I. Hers are older and my youngest is the baby of the 4, and isn’t in daycare yet. She lives about 45 mins away from me so we hang out with the kids/family every few weeks.

    One big reason we’re keeping my baby home with a nanny is to avoid daycare germs for a bit longer, as I am in an intense new job and can’t afford sick time. But whenever I get together with my friend’s family, we end up catching something pretty major from her youngest kid, who has a constant runny nose or fever/other symptoms. I try to check with friend before we get together – “lets make sure nobody’s sick so we don’t trade germs.” (I also frame it as saying mine aren’t sick – but of course she doesn’t care as much if they were).

    Example 1 – when my youngest was a couple months old, we went over (she said her youngest had gotten over a cold, and she really wanted to hang out since we hadn’t met in a couple months post-birth). We hung out with the families, and my baby ended up with a major cold/infection needing antibiotics, I got sick as well with a fever, and it was Weeks before we were all ok again (think nighttime coughing fits that woke up baby and all of us, lots of crying jags and cough-induced vomiting). I’m sure we got the germs from my friend’s youngest kid.

    Example 2 – a few weeks ago, we were going to go over to their place and my friend said “hey fyi, youngest had head lice from her school, but we did a whole purge this weekend and washed sheets so should be ok to visit”. I said uh oh, let us skip this weekend just to be sure, as I don’t want baby to get head lice. So we went over a week later, with assurances that all is fine. Visit was on saturday. I’m in my office Monday morning, head is itchy and lo and behold! A head lice actually falls out! I went home that night and washed my hair in extra-hot water and washed the sheets and checked my baby’s hair – all seemed ok. It’s now 2 weeks later and I’m starting with the itchiness and symptoms again. I’m so aghast as I hate, hate head lice – I’m a little traumatized by a childhood largely filled with lice incidents.

    Bottom line:
    – I’m so itchy and I need to get some OTC products tonight to get rid of the lice! Gosh I hate them so much.

    – I really love my friend and I rationally know it isn’t her “fault”. I think she figures if we rule out all sick situations, we’ll never ever meet. But I would prefer fewer meetings over these bad contagion situations. Meet frequency is also very much reduced now (mainly by me, for this reason).

    I don’t want to tell her “we got head lice because of you” as that would just make her feel bad and not solve any problem.

    Give me some perspective/commiseration?

    1. Another example, I caught a cold from her kid while pregnant that turned into pneumonia and me being in bed and out of work for a few days. Sometimes she’ll say her kid has allergies while I feel like it’s obviously a virus, but her kid never seems as badly affected as we are when we catch it.
      I love her kid and I love my friend. I feel like it’s happened one too many times though. Reduce contact for a few months and come back when baby is older, or am I overreacting?

      1. if you are so badly affected, can you do anything to boost your immune system? Do you take vitamin C/zinc/multivitamin/rest enough when ill?

        1. These are old wives tales.

          Signed,
          MD and daughter of a parent with a primary immunodeficiency.

      2. It sounds like you have a fragile immune system. Normal adults don’t get pneumonia from a cold.

          1. Really? Just from being pregnant? I’ve been pregnant 4 times (so multiple times as a parent with a small child in daycare). I didn’t think I was any sicker (and might have been healthier since I was getting the good prenatal vitamins and not donating blood, which I usually do non-pregnant). Have not heard this before now.

          2. Disclaimer: IANAD. I think there’s info out there that a pregnant women’s immune system is suppressed to some degree in order to not reject the developing fetus. But that doesn’t translate as “fragile” to me. Probably depends on what you started with.

            If you started out germophobic, your immune system is probably weak overall, and then pregnancy exacerbates the issue. If you’ve had a bunch of germ exposure (on account of having small children), you might be in a better place?

    2. So we had lice. The OTC products do not work any more. Get a lice lady to come to your house and comb everyone out. Also, DRY all the sheets etc. on hot (you don’t need to wash them). Otherwise they may not all go away.

      1. On lice: do not use OTC products. Look up someone near you who does AirAlle (also called Larada Sciences, I think). They kill the lice using hot air, then do an extensive comb-out and oil treatment. We had persistent lice and were religious about combing for months, but nothing worked until we spent the money for AirAlle.

    3. 1. second babies always get sick more than first babies. My first had one cold in nine months. My first was in daycare when the next was born – brought home a cold every month for the first six months which my youngest always caught. I don’t stress about it because it’s actually good for their immune system and kids that get more colds in preschool years, get less cold later.

      2. she’s right that if you wait until no one is remotely sick that you will never see each other – my friend group guideline is no fever/not on antibiotics/ no vomiting etc for 24 hours. If you’re well enough for daycare, you’re well enough for a playdate.

      3. if you have a head lice phobia (understandable because gross!) -then meet at a playground or other neutral place next time.

      4. plan more adult activities with your friend and no kids

      1. Agree that second babies get sick more, but our first one is in elementary school not daycare, doesn’t seem to bring home germs (we are past the first year of daycare which was a cold a week) and so my second doesn’t catch anything from him typically.

        1. Your oldest can still bring home germs that make the baby sick even if the oldest isn’t sick themselves.

    4. Meet at a playground. Meet up less, but when you do keep it outside where the kids are much less likely to trade germs.

      1. +1 Meet on neutral territory.

        Also, I totally understand the desire to minimize interaction with sick kids and people for all kinds of reasons, but kids do get sick. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing for your kid to get sick occasionally.

    5. I think people have a different tolerance for these things. I have two good friends with babies and one will cancel if she so much as suspects that hers is getting sick and expects the same from me, and another who doesn’t care at all. I’ve told her before when we’re a bit sick and she’ll just say that’s okay. With her, I just frame it as an “I can’t be sick right now situation” – for some reason, it’s much easier for her to respect the notion that I have something specific this week that I need to be “on” for so baby and I need to be extra cautious vs. I would rather just not deal with a sick baby. Have you told her about how stressful/limited your job is *right now*? Can you re-iterate when you are making plans/checking in before hand? “Hey big meeting Tuesday and I can’t take any sick time, is everyone well?”

      1. +1 It’s no fun when your kids/family get sick, but you’re unfairly looking to take that out on your friend, and that’s not cool. What you’re describing is normal and natural and yes one of the annoying things about raising kids, but it’s part of the package and you’ll be a lot happier (and have better relationships with your friends) if you accept that.

        2. Thanks for the perspective. It’s hard for me to remember in the middle of the night after the 8th waking (coughing bout) when I’m thinking “darn, shouldn’t have gone over to friend’s house last weekend and caught the germs!”. Or today when I’m scratching my head at work and thinking “She said the lice were gone, aah I can’t believe I have lice!”.
          But I rationally know it’s not her fault.

    7. I hear you. I agree with others that kids get sick, BUT I also believe that no one should be inviting you to their house when their kids are getting over head lice! Yuck! I would be so grossed out and I would be super p**sed if my kids or I contracted it. Definitely meet outside of the home at a park or playground. It won’t solve the issue entirely but may help. Good luck. Constant sickness is no fun.

    8. She has told you each time that her kids are sick or that they had lice in their house, and you went anyway. Next time, make sure that no one has a fever or is on antibiotics, and meet at a park.

      1. No, she told me each time that her kids were OVER their sickness. She also said they HAD lice, but they had gone through the treatments and done the laundry and they were now lice-free.

        1. No, she told me each time that her kids were OVER their sickness. She also said they HAD lice, but they had gone through the treatments and done the laundry and they were now lice-free.

    9. The head lice sucks, but I think you are unfairly accusing her of the first instance. Your own child could be bringing home germs and not getting sick. Don’t a lot of people say that their kids bring home germs and the parents get sick, not the kids? I would be careful saying anything to her about her kids being germy but I you probably need to tell her to take precaution for lice in her house.

      1. You really can’t know where your kids picked up those germs. Germs are everywhere, and some illnesses are contagious several days before symptoms start. Being sick still blows, so I understand you’re trying to minimize risk, but there’s only so much you can do and I think you may be scapegoating your friend.

        The lice are another thing and a little more straightforward – I’d probably be annoyed and the friend, too. Head lice are super sh!tty – my sisters had them twice in our childhood. Wash and dry ALL linens, clothing, stuffed animals/lovies – basically anything fabric that can go in a washing machine – on the absolute hottest setting you can. Anything non-essential gets sealed in a plastic bag for a couple of weeks. Get a pediatrician’s recommendation for an OTC product and use that nit comb, or get a lice lady to help you.

    10. I get the vent/slight resentment. I was on a plane with someone coughing and sneezing about a week and half ago and got sick as soon as I got home and have been miserable ever since. I know logically it’s not his fault but I still blame him. I would probably be annoyed at a friend who got me sick as well, although I wouldn’t do or say anything because it’s not worth creating an issue about.

    11. The lice situation aside…. isn’t your kid the one with the weak immune system since she’s staying at home? Kids in daycare do get more sick but they are more resilient because of it.

    12. This is probably not your friend’s fault. Okay, maybe the lice you wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t visited. But you don’t know when or where those germs came from, so stop blaming your poor friend. You two have different tolerances and apparently different immune systems, but that’s not a character flaw on her part.

    13. Can you give the kids and yourself a bath/shower, or at the least wash faces and hands and change playdate clothes when you get home from playdate? This will reduce transmission of a lot of contagious illnesses, just like simple handwashing is promoted to minimize flu/cold transmission.

  7. Question. What would you wear to a rehearsal dinner where the dress code is “seaside casual” (it is on the coast) BUT jackets are required and it is in November? Can I just ignore and wear a nice date-night type dress?

    1. Doesn’t “jackets required” apply only to men outside of the work environment? If your date night dress looks appropriate next to your husband’s suit, I would think it would be fine.

      1. +1 “Jackets required” on a dress code pertains only to men. I think the date night dress sounds perfect.

      2. Yes, I am just perplexed by why they say “casual” and then “jackets” in the same dress code!

    3. Jackets required is for men. I’d wear whatever dress is normally wear out to a nice dinner.

    4. Can you call the venue? If it’s a dress code set by the venue they may be able to give you more guidance.

    5. This doesn’t make sense at all. I would interpret “seaside casual” as beachy, like a sundress. How would that be jackets required? Jackets required =/= casual? Date-night dress sounds fine.

      1. Right, seaside casual to me is like…J. Crew and Vineyard Vines, not date night clothes. What a confusing dress code.

          1. Maybe they want country club attire? Or something reminiscent of photos of the Kennedys from a 1950s Life magazine?

    6. Long shot, but you did say it’s in November…any chance it says jackets required because it’s going to be cold?

      2. You don’t say “Jackets required” if you’re just warning people it will be cold. You say something like: “The venue is open air and on the water, so it may be chilly. Please bring a jacket.”

  8. Hi all,
    Do you wise ladies know how I can address a cover letter for an internal position with possibly multiple hiring managers? I talked to the manager to whom this position would report, and she mentioned that there would be a hiring committee (of other people in my department), and though she doesn’t know who that would consist of, she wouldn’t be the only one making the decision. I feel a bit odd simply writing “Dear Hiring Managers” when it’s an internal posting, and I know at least one of the hiring managers. Any suggestions?

    1. I would address it to the person I know, with a verbal request to share with the committee.

  9. For in-house attorneys – at what point in your career did you move in-house? Is there anything you wish you would have done in your career prior to making that move?

    2. Went in-house after five years of litigation in Big Law. I do transactional work now. I wish that I had (1) tried harder to get some more corporate/transactional assignments while at the firm (or pushed harder to transition into transactional work) just for the training that I would get at a firm that was lacking when I was thrown in the deep end when I started in-house; and (2) used my Big Law book budget to buy as many practical books I could on my chosen industry and legal issues relating to it and/or attended corporate/transactional CLEs while I had the opportunities (and they were comped!). I’ve done some catch-up reading on my own, but I could have utilized the BigLaw resources better to help prepare me.

      My experience and advice might be too specific to those transitioning from Big Law litigation to a transactional in-house role… But a global piece of advice is to want to work in the industry you’re going into as in-house counsel. So much of the work depends on knowing the industry, its practices, nuances, business terms and general course of dealing – in my case, I’m still learning about the industry and I’m surprised (though I probably shouldn’t have been) at what a huge role the industry specifics play in my job. But i love the industry I’m in – I can’t imagine learning these details and arguing them all day if it wasn’t a cause/industry/product I believed in and was interested in, enough to live it all day long. It’s different from litigation, where you move from case to case and client to client – consider whether there is a particular client whose industry you’d want to work in. Not to say there isn’t variety in the legal issues that come up, but it’s like committing to one client for your career.

    3. After working as a litigator for 3 years.

      I enjoyed litigation and would have done it for longer but for a number of reasons my job situation at my firm was no longer tenable. In house is incredibly different. Some days I think the most helpful thing I learned as a litigator was public speaking. The rest of what I do doesn’t really require my litigation experience that much.

    1. I haven’t, but I bought an Ann Taylor coat years ago that is still going strong and I always get lots of compliments!

  11. We’re TTC. When thinking through which of us will be the “primary parent” (at least for the first 3-5 years) we’ve considered work schedules, where we are in terms of seniority in our careers, current salaries, earning potential, lengths of commute, etc. Most everything we’ve factored in has been career-related. What other factors would you consider? Should we be giving some weight to “who is better with kids” generally? Is pretending like we can plan this absurd in the first place?!

    1. Don’t worry about it now other than making sure your spouse has a “generally equal” attitude about things and is ready to pitch in to do his/her fair share. Beyond that, it’s just scheduling.

      1. +1 to not being able to fully plan but it’s great to have that conversation now.

    2. You can’t really plan this. And it may flex and change. You could have a job loss. You could have PPD and require your DH to really lean in at home. You could have a high risk pregnancy or a sick child. You can’t plan all this stuff. Think of it as more than just the two of you as well. What’s your village? Who do you call when DH just doesn’t understand? Who are his examples of great dads who he will lean on?

      I love the newborn stage and the school age stage and my husband prefers the toddler/preschooler age. We didn’t know this until we had kids. You both need to be involved from the very beginning because otherwise one person becomes the default parent and the other person doesn’t know how to be involved. That means if you’re nursing – sometimes you still wake him up to get the baby back to sleep and you go to bed.

      1. Thank you. I’ve given thought to our “village” but not in the way you’ve described. And I think it would be really helpful for us to really think about who those people are and what support we can expect to ask them for.

        and thank you for your second paragraph. Part of knowing we can’t really plan this is knowing that we’ll have no idea how we feel for sure until we actually have a kid. But getting on the same page about early involvement and striving for fairly shared responsibility definitely sets us up better.

    3. NO!! You should *plan* for both of you to be equally good with your kids. Being “good” with (your own) kids is a matter of how much time and effort you put into it. It is unrelated to how you relate to other people’s children. My husband and I made a commitment early on that neither of us would permit there to be any aspect of child care that only one of us could/would do. And it’s one of the best choices we made, both for our kids and our relationship.

      1. yes – give zero weight to ‘who is better with kids’ as it is totally different with your own kids. Plus, that will almost always default to the woman or whoever had to care for younger siblings. I knew how to dress a baby because I used to babysit as a teenager. DH learned after we had a baby. He’s currently a SAHD. I’d lose my mind if I had to be home with a baby all day.

      2. I really appreciate your tip about there not being any aspect of child care that only one of us could/would do. I think that’s a really great guideline to have!

        The conversation we’re having about primary parenting isn’t intended to let one of us off the hook. While one of us could likely stay home for a couple of years, and we’re working through whether we want to do that, and if so, which of us will stay home, the intention was to really consider and work through those (hopefully rare) times that we have competing schedules or priorities. Part of the conversation has been about whether we should switch off, so we’re working through all of the possibilities, but also considering that if one of us can lean out a lot for a time, it may be better than having both of us lean out a little? But then again, I’m open to the possibility that we have no idea what we’re talking about and we’ll throw everything we talked about out the window after a few months of sleepless nights!

        2. It seems like the fact that you’re talking about it now is a good sign. Not a parent, so take this with a grain of salt, but there was just a poster on the mom s*te who tried to explain emotional work and her husband didn’t get it until she made him read the thread. Idk whether you can figure this out now or not, but your DH seems ahead of the game if he knows what a default parent is.

      1. We’re on the same page about striving for equal parenting. We’re fortunate enough income-wise that one of us could stay home with our child, so that is a part of the conversation. I think we also want to have this conversation now, so that when the time comes and we have to lean one way or the other, for whatever reason, we’ve thought through why we’ll lean a particular way.

        1. If you want to be equal parents, making one of you financially dependent on the other won’t do it. Literally the entire point of lean in is that you keep doing it until it doesn’t work. Deciding what you’ll do with a five year old when you’re not even pregnant? Definition of leaving before you leave.

          1. I understand what you mean, for sure. So many things can happen that we can’t take into account today. And I certainly don’t want either of us to be in a position where we’re vulnerable. But we do both agree that as of right now, for our family, we want to consider whether one of us will stay home for the first few years. It’s an ongoing conversation, not a decision we’ll make today that will go unevaluated for the next 18+ years. Ultimately we made decide that neither of us stays home, but I hope that we can have the conversation in as fully-informed a way as possible and in advance of actually having a baby.

          2. I don’t think you can really know if you want to stay home until you have the baby though. If both of you enjoy your jobs, I think you should both plan to go back to work, and then if after the baby arrives, one of you feels drawn to stay at home parenting, you can reevaluate then. Choosing to stay home before you even have a baby is the definition of “leaving before you leave” (and I say that regardless of which parent is making the choice to stay home).

          3. OP should take a cue from the economists that won the Nobel Prize this year. Don’t try to figure out *what* decisions you’ll make 5 years from now. Figure out *how* you’ll make them.

        2. Income wise is only the first question. Do either or both of you want to stay home? This may change 100% after you have kids.

          We could easily stay home on either salary. DH is currently a SAHD on a leave of absence and goes back to work in 6 months. I have zero interest in staying home. I have a much shorter commute – I’m happiest as a working mom with a super short commute.

    5. What do you mean by primary parent? I think you can talk generally about scheduling and division of labor- who can work from home better when baby is sick, who is better at scheduling doctor’s appointments, whose office is more convenient for daycare drop-off, etc. But the rest of it you really won’t know until you are in the thick of it. And even then, the day that the kid is home sick is the day that both of you have critical meetings that you can’t reschedule. But otherwise, both of you need to have the skills and confidence to take care of any child-related task.

      1. Yes, this. I think you can generally agree that one of you has more ability to take unscheduled PTO and that person will be the first line for last minute sick days, while the other person picks up more of the scheduled stuff (well baby visits, days daycare is planned to be closed, etc). But that will all ebb and flow – and heck, you could have it all worked out that you will be the primary earner and H will be the primary child wrangler – and then at some point you could decide that that isn’t working for you *at all* despite your previous arrangement and is there any way that H can pick up more hours or you can re-prioritize to allow you to be a SAHP or work very part time? Been there, done that. Every year or two our situation has changed, and we’ve just rolled with it.

        My number one advice is to learn to not criticize the other person’s parenting/housekeeping as long as stuff is getting done and no one is in danger of losing life or limb. So H doesn’t load the dishwasher the way you do or dresses the kid in a color combo that looks nuts to you or you don’t mow the grass the way he would do it? The person who didn’t have to do it needs to keep quiet, because *done* is good enough, lets all move on to the next task.

    6. Primary parent doesn’t have to be for all aspects. I’m the primary parent for daycare pickup/drop off, because we chose a daycare with long hours that is a couple blocks from my office. My husband is the primary parent for ensuring our dog gets 1 to 2 walks per day. We swap the late nights based on who needs to get to the office earlier the following morning. If you’re BF’ing, it might make sense for your husband to take on more of the diaper changing.

      The key is to make sure you’re both communicating when you’re feeling overburdened and be ready to change things up if needed. Don’t start keeping score.

      1. + 1 to the swapping diaper changes for BF. I only changed diapers if DH wasn’t home.

      2. Thank you for this. It makes a lot of sense to distinguish between who will be primary by task. And to some degree, I’m sure we’ll have to wait and see for that. But that probably also helps a lot with not keeping score.

        Part of my motivation to have these conversations early and often was to avoid the keeping score mentality. If we both go into it understanding that we’ve thought through and really considered which of us should be “default” (and I really think the times we have to resort to the default will be limited, unless we decide that one of us will stay home with the baby for a time), I’m hopeful that will help minimize the score keeping.

        But again, so many things can happen that change the equation, and we’re open to keeping the conversation going and coming back to it over and over to see what’s working and what isn’t.

        1. if you do decide to have one person stay at home. I would encourage you to consider that as a job. So you are responsible for childcare 9-5/8-6 or whatever the standard work hours are. You are both responsible for childcare at other times. That means if your partner needs to go into the office on Saturday, he discusses it with you in advance and finds childcare if you’re not available. Stay at home parent gets up with the baby on weeknights and the work outside the home parent gets up on Friday and Saturday nights. You each get to sleep in on one weekend morning etc.

          1. Thank you. That’s a really reasonable approach and it sounds like it would help avoid the “default” parent issue where one parent is just assumed to be the childcare provider all the time.

          2. Also talk about whether the SAHP will be primarily in charge of the house. A lot of people seem to expect a SAHM to cook a meal every night, do the dishes, care for the pets and keep the house clean with little support from the husband (maybe he takes out the trash or something like men did in the 1950s). That wouldn’t fly with me – if I’m staying home to care for the child, I see my primary job as childcare not house care and I think the working parent needs to help around the house too. I mean, sure, if the SAHP can throw in a load of laundry or chop some veggies for dinner when the baby is taking a nap, that’s great, but if it’s a crazy day and the baby doesn’t nap well, the working parent should happily pick up takeout on the way home. And when both parents are home they should both be involved in the child, pet and house care. The fact that the SAHP was home all day with the kid isn’t an excuse for the working parent to kick back in front of the TV with a beer while the SAHP continues doing the childcare and chores they’ve been doing all day.

          3. On the other hand, my husband stays at home (and actually does most of the housekeeping stuff too ) but I hate the expectation that when I come home I am 100% parenting. I was just 100% working! I know no one gets to kick back with a beer until kiddo is in bed, AND I know how tiring childcare is, but boy would I love to not be the only one parenting after a stressful day at work.

    7. I agree that you can’t plan and that it’s best to aim for both to be hands on and then adjust as needed given different circumstances. But to give you some unsolicited advice – even if one of you is better at some things, it’s important to not let that become a thing. So if he’s never changed a diaper and you used to babysit, let him change the diaper anyway, that’s how he’ll learn even if he doesn’t do it right the first few times. If you can get the baby to sleep faster, doesn’t mean he should not try anyway even if it takes 15 min. more screaming to get it done. Likewise, if he’s better at folding the stroller, you should still do it and learn how to install a car seat and so on. I’ve seen a lot of friends fall into the trap of “this is just easier/faster” and then fast forward a year and they are incredibly exhausted/frustrated that they are stuck doing X all the time and their partner doesn’t help out. I’ve also seen friends who are so anxious to divide all responsibilities exactly 50/50 that they count diaper changes or insist their partner wakes up with them when they nurse the baby at night. That’s also crazy! So my point is just try to come at this from a flexible and respectful place and you’ll be okay. I think the idea of “primary parent” describes a certain situation but your goal should always be to have you both switching who wears the PP fairly regularly, week to week, day to day.

      1. Thank you, AIMS. This is really great advice. I have a friend who appears to have fallen into the trap of “I’ll do everything myself rather than wait for my husband to figure it out” and she’s really struggling with feeling like it’s all on her. I hope to avoid falling into that pattern, and I’m hopeful that we’ll both be on the lookout for that in order to guard against it.

    8. So, just to add another perspective, there is *no* primary parent in my household and that’s the case with 3 of my closest friends as well. DH and I work similar full-time hours, and we trade-off kid sick days, pick-ups, drop-offs, sports practices, etc. Our kids also spend a fair amount of time in after care, although DH and I have shifted schedules so he goes in earlier and leaves earlier and our kids can be picked up directly from school 2 afternoons a week, while going to after care 3 days a week. They don’t mind after care because they enjoy the playground, friends, etc. When kids were younger, we had a series of nannies. So, TL;DR: you can be equal parents and share parent and household duties pretty evenly.

    9. My two cents: (1) don’t pick a default parent and (2) it’s okay to keep score. Both my husband and I work. I technically make more and have a higher stress job, but he’s ambitious in his career and has taken on a significant amount of volunteer work that’s important to him and good networking. The result is that we’re both pretty busy, but both have a decent amount of flexibility with our hours. For example, we can both stay at home for a day if we need to because the kiddo is sick and can’t go to daycare, and we both can usually drop our afternoon obligations if we need to take the kiddo to a doctor’s appointment.

      We have NEVER picked a default parent. From day one we shared all responsibilities, except for bfeeding. He would bring the baby to me in the middle of the night for feedings, change the diaper, re-swaddle and rock back to sleep. We alternated diaper changes. As soon as I could pump, he handled half the feedings with a bottle. We made sure we did not have a default parent because we kept score. We therefore both knew whose “turn” it was to change the diaper, to get the baby down for a nap, to give a bottle, etc.

      If we need to take time off work, we check to see whose schedule can more easily be adjusted. So far it’s been primarily my husband, although I have handled the past two doctor appointments and daycare closures because he’s been busier.

      I’ve found it isn’t that hard to make it work if both partners are respectful of each other’s time and want to be hands-on, active parents.

  12. I got a very nice email from one of the Nordstrom brothers who said that while none of them want to be in the position of defending DT, Ivanka has always been, personally and brand-wise, a very good partner with the store. They prefer to let customers make their own decisions, and that to be fair, Ivanka is not her father.

    I still would like to see a boycott of her brands.

    1. I’m impressed they responded in such a thoughtful way.

      I definitely happen to believe that while Ivanka is not her father, Ivanka’s words and actions stand on their own as reason for Nordstrom to discontinue their relationship with her, but of course that’s ultimately their decision. Until Nordstrom feels financial pressure to cut off their relationship with her, I imagine we’ll continue to see her products promoted.

    2. I like her products and don’t give a hoot if she stomps on puppies in her free time. If I can find a reasonably-priced, cute, work-appropriate piece that fits me I’m all for it.

    3. I hate Trump with the rest of them but I also feel like Ivanka must be under tremendous pressure to remain in her father’s good graces. He is a scary man who doesn’t respect women. What would he do to her and her brand if she pissed him off. I believe that many of her statements are essentially made under duress and she really doesn’t believe them. I don’t buy her stuff anyway but I don’t have a problem with stores selling her brand. It’s not like Donald is going to inherit her money.

      1. What would he do to her and her brand if she pissed him off.

        Maybe she could get a job based on her actual qualifications rather than on who her dad is like the rest of us do?

    4. Good for Nordstroms. I don’t like Trump either but glad they’re being balanced about it. ( I admire them a lot and know some of the Nordstrom family members.)

  13. Ladies, a very overdue thanks for the suggestions yesterday. I have been craving broccoli slaw ever since. : )

  14. Hi Kat – none of today’s posts are showing up in my Bloglovin feed. Last post I have is from yesterday.

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