Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Work like you’re not a parent.
Parent like you don’t work.
What if that whole system is wrong?
This is Full Stack Moms, and we are Mallory Lee and Shannon Curran, two working moms navigating tech careers, parenting, and everything in between. We talk about why the traditional rules of work don’t fit modern parents and how women in tech are doing things differently. Through honest conversations and behind-the-scenes stories, this show explores careers, caregiving, ambition, and the messy reality of having it all, just not all at once.
Connect with Mallory: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorylee/
Connect with Shannon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannon-sweeny-curran/
Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com
[00:00:00] Sydney Mulligan: She was like, I don't understand why they're letting you go. You're on maternity leave. And like, why wouldn't they let me go if they only need one MOPS person? And I was like, girl, I know how the, oops. They pay you. I know how much they pay me. I'm drawing healthcare for a family of four and two times childcare benefit.
[00:00:17] Sydney Mulligan: Like if this is about money, right? I'm costing them a lot more.
[00:00:25] Mallory Lee: This is Full Stack Moms.
[00:00:27] Shannon Curran: This is not a parenting podcast nor a business podcast, but a place where we talk building careers in tech, raising kids at home and making it work in public. That's crazy. We have like matching dimples. Oh my. And glasses.
[00:00:39] Shannon Curran: That's crazy. Why have we never, oh my gosh.
[00:00:41] Sydney Mulligan: You're right. Should I
[00:00:41] Shannon Curran: put on my black
[00:00:42] Sydney Mulligan: glasses just to like really throw people?
[00:00:44] Shannon Curran: I used to, I used to wear those glasses. I just changed like race. Yeah.
[00:00:48] Sydney Mulligan: Oh, that's so funny.
[00:00:49] Shannon Curran: Yeah.
[00:00:49] Sydney Mulligan: That's so funny. Um, so funny.
[00:00:51] Shannon Curran: Good thing I have my headphones on so you can tell the difference.
[00:00:53] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah. There you go. All I went for the in ears. Uh, can you see anything weird behind me? No. Right. Got some piles of stuff to go to Goodwill back there, but you can't see those? Okay.
[00:01:02] Shannon Curran: No, you're good. I don't think so.
[00:01:03] Sydney Mulligan: You're good. Good. Right.
[00:01:06] Shannon Curran: Talk about how that's just like, all of life is always having piles of stuff to go to Goodwill.
[00:01:10] Shannon Curran: Like, it's like,
[00:01:10] Sydney Mulligan: yeah.
[00:01:11] Shannon Curran: It's know,
[00:01:12] Sydney Mulligan: you know, I say Goodwill, like in the same way that you say Kleenex to mean tissues. We don't have a Goodwill. We have
[00:01:17] Shannon Curran: like a Oh, you don't?
[00:01:19] Sydney Mulligan: No. There was a Goodwill on 72nd Street and it closed, like during COVID. Got it. Because it was just full of shit. No one ever shot there.
[00:01:26] Sydney Mulligan: That's fair. Yeah.
[00:01:28] Mallory Lee: Unfortunately I don't have the goodwill. We also have like a have Savors Salvation Army thing.
[00:01:33] Sydney Mulligan: We have a housing works.
[00:01:36] Shannon Curran: I
[00:01:36] Sydney Mulligan: have a few
[00:01:37] Shannon Curran: meetings
[00:01:38] Mallory Lee: I've converted to laundry baskets for my Goodwill piles, and that has, it's been helpful. It's a thing that allows me to have a designated,
[00:01:49] Sydney Mulligan: yeah, like the Home Basket.
[00:01:51] Sydney Mulligan: The problem is a laundry basket is really great for putting in your car. But I don't have a car.
[00:01:58] Shannon Curran: Right, right.
[00:02:00] Sydney Mulligan: So it really needs to be in bags. But I, there is an organization that will come pick up stuff mostly. Of course there is. Yeah. It's like a breast cancer fundraiser. And I'm not totally clear on how it works, but I'm pretty sure they're just like going through your shit and selling what is valuable,
[00:02:16] Shannon Curran: fair.
[00:02:16] Sydney Mulligan: And it goes to breast cancer. I honestly don't care what they're doing with it. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:02:21] Mallory Lee: I love that.
[00:02:21] Shannon Curran: For, for them there's this, there's someone that like donates to the schools, like the same situation. Like if you put like toys and stuff in the, and they'll come and pick it up. Great. Uh, I'm like, great, great.
[00:02:30] Shannon Curran: What? Whoever you are. Wonderful. I was like, I love you. I don't
[00:02:33] Sydney Mulligan: care. I love you.
[00:02:35] Shannon Curran: I love you. You're a part of my village. I appreciate you
[00:02:38] Sydney Mulligan: the village. Now, thank you very much.
[00:02:40] Mallory Lee: A fun story for you Sydnee to start us off. Um,
[00:02:43] Sydney Mulligan: great.
[00:02:45] Mallory Lee: So we are Moms in Tech, but. We are not, we shall not be called Moms in Tech.
[00:02:51] Sydney Mulligan: Okay?
[00:02:53] Sydney Mulligan: Is it?
[00:02:53] Mallory Lee: We got a friendly. Yeah. Yeah,
[00:02:59] Shannon Curran: new. I got a friendly note. Hot off. Hot off the press. We are illegal, so that is wonderful.
[00:03:06] Sydney Mulligan: So what are we going with today? We're going with Mallory and Shannon.
[00:03:09] Shannon Curran: I know. Well kind
[00:03:10] Mallory Lee: of basically yeah, we're, we're working on that to figure it out. But I mean, I don't think we were really ever saying the name during our conversations with people anyway, so,
[00:03:21] Shannon Curran: no,
[00:03:21] Mallory Lee: I think.
[00:03:22] Mallory Lee: We're gonna be all right. Um,
[00:03:24] Shannon Curran: you've
[00:03:24] Mallory Lee: really
[00:03:24] Shannon Curran: waited once. You got your first cease deist and we hadn't even launched yet. Weird. So we clearly episode. I know I
[00:03:31] Mallory Lee: was episode zero episodes,
[00:03:32] Shannon Curran: zero episodes already illegal, you know what I mean? Like
[00:03:36] Sydney Mulligan: incredible. I
[00:03:36] Shannon Curran: feel like I have a badass
[00:03:37] Sydney Mulligan: especi mind. Zero episodes already illegal.
[00:03:40] Sydney Mulligan: You can incorporate that into your trailer.
[00:03:43] Shannon Curran: We're gonna rerecord another episode being like, so, uh, episode zero again. Um, here we are,
[00:03:48] Sydney Mulligan: by the way. Zero episode's already illegal.
[00:03:51] Shannon Curran: Yeah, I love it. Oh my God, I love it. But welcome to our new show.
[00:03:55] Mallory Lee: Thanks. Yes,
[00:03:56] Shannon Curran: I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:58] Mallory Lee: Welcome on.
[00:04:00] Mallory Lee: Um, the way that I would love to do this is to just kind of meet you, right? Get a little intro, hear about you and your family to whatever extent that you feel comfortable sharing. Just kind of like tell us about your situation. Um, and then I'll kind of hop into like how I know you. And then we'll just talk about maternity leave.
[00:04:21] Mallory Lee: Well, hi Sydnee, thank you so much for joining us. Please tell everybody a little bit about yourself and your family.
[00:04:27] Sydney Mulligan: Well, thank you guys for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Congrats on the new podcast. How wonderful. Thanks.
[00:04:33] Mallory Lee: Thank you. Thanks.
[00:04:34] Sydney Mulligan: Um, so my name is Sydnee. I live in New York City. I have a husband and I have two kids.
[00:04:41] Sydney Mulligan: My son, chance is six and a half, and my daughter Ellie, just turned four. My son is in first grade, my daughter is in three K, going to pre-K next year. We're living that city life,
[00:04:55] Mallory Lee: so
[00:04:55] Sydney Mulligan: Awesome.
[00:04:56] Shannon Curran: Yes. That is awesome.
[00:04:58] Mallory Lee: And how about work? What's your work
[00:05:00] Sydney Mulligan: like? Oh, right work. I am the co-founder of EMMIECollective, where we call ourselves an agency ish, or for, we do marketing ops and revenue ops work with a network of incredible independent consultants all over the world.
[00:05:14] Sydney Mulligan: And EMMIECollective is my third child. Her name's em. She's my third child and um, she was born while I was on maternity leave with my youngest, which I'm sure we will get into more in our little
[00:05:26] Mallory Lee: maternity leave
[00:05:27] Sydney Mulligan: chat today.
[00:05:28] Mallory Lee: Exactly. That's great. Shannon also has two businesses or two kids in a,
[00:05:35] Shannon Curran: in a
[00:05:35] Mallory Lee: business, what is it?
[00:05:36] Mallory Lee: Two. Two kids. Two babies in a business.
[00:05:38] Shannon Curran: Two babies. Two Es. Yeah. I also have three under three. Three. I have three under three. Two under three. Yeah. Yeah. And my, well, your
[00:05:44] kids
[00:05:44] Sydney Mulligan: were under three.
[00:05:47] Shannon Curran: Yes, they are. I had two under two until recently. I have a two and a half year old and an eight month old. Wow. God bless.
[00:05:54] Shannon Curran: Yeah. You know, we're doing it and my business just turned two, so I had like a very similar, actually I came back from maternity leave and birthed the business. So. Nice. Um, I am interested to hear. I love that when Mallory brings people on the pod. I don't know anything. So it's kind of like, it's
[00:06:09] Sydney Mulligan: so fun, right?
[00:06:09] Sydney Mulligan: It's fun
[00:06:10] Shannon Curran: to be get
[00:06:10] Sydney Mulligan: going for the first time on a podcast.
[00:06:11] Mallory Lee: I'm eager to kind of hear Sydnee about your experiences with maternity leave. Yeah. Especially because you started your business while on maternity leave and I'm just, yeah. I wanna know all about it.
[00:06:23] Sydney Mulligan: So with my oldest, I had sort of the opposite experience that it sounds like Shannon, you had where?
[00:06:29] Sydney Mulligan: Uh, I got pregnant and it was a big surprise. We had just moved to New York. My husband and I, we were 26. We had been in the city for three or four months and I found out I was pregnant the fifth, and I spent my pregnancy doing the best I could to be prepared. But we're was a little bit behind the eight ball in terms of like we've moved into this teeny tiny apartment.
[00:06:54] Sydney Mulligan: That was supposed to be just the two of us. We did happen to have two bedrooms because I was working from home full time and I was like, oh, I need an office. Like, well, goodbye. Your office is a nursery now. Uh, it was just a, it was a huge transition. By the time I had my son, I felt like I was ready enough.
[00:07:11] Sydney Mulligan: It's sort of like when you anticipate something for so long, you know, it's sort of like, let's just do it. Like I, there's, what else can I possibly do? Never gonna be more ready than I
[00:07:19] Shannon Curran: am right
[00:07:19] Sydney Mulligan: now. I'm never gonna be more ready than I am right now. Like, let's just get it over. The company I worked for at the time offered, uh, 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave.
[00:07:30] Sydney Mulligan: And when I heard that I was like, wow, like that's incredible. I've never not worked for 12 weeks. Like, that's awesome and I'm gonna be paid the whole time. Like, that's gonna feel so great. It was not enough. Not even close to enough. I don't know what would've felt like enough, but I was in no way ready to go back to work.
[00:07:57] Sydney Mulligan: The maternity leave itself was nice. First of all, I had my son in the early summer, which cannot recommend highly enough. The early summers perfect, perfect times tar your maternity leave in New York, we were like, we have to be outside. We'll be outside all day long. Central Park is where we exist in the entire daylight hours.
[00:08:13] Sydney Mulligan: We taking naps on picnic blankets in the park. We're walking around stroller like we're just outside all the time. I also was very fortunate that I found a new mom support group in my neighborhood. Which was incredible for a lot of reasons. Obviously it was incredible to just like meet a community of women who were all on maternity leave at the same time.
[00:08:33] Sydney Mulligan: All of our babies were of course, like within a few months of each other, and we all lived like within 10 blocks of each other. And I, I don't know how I have gotten through maternity leave and early motherhood without having that community of people. But with the maternity leave, when I was going back to work, I was also fortunate that one of my coworkers, this was a very small company, was on maternity leave at exactly the same time.
[00:08:57] Sydney Mulligan: Like we had our babies hours from each other. So we were coming back also at exactly the same time, and we were the first people to have ever taken maternity leave at the company. So they were sort of figuring out how to handle this too. And this was so long ago. I've like moved on from this, but. Our return to work was not treated the same way like mine was extremely by the book.
[00:09:25] Sydney Mulligan: Like we give you 12 weeks and then you come back full time and that's the end of the discussion. And hers was, oh, you wanna take a few more weeks? Oh, you wanna come back part-time? Oh, we'll still pay you your full salary. The whole thing. And recognizing that I got what I was promised, like there's not, actually, I got what I was promised.
[00:09:45] Sydney Mulligan: It felt at the time as someone who. Was not ready to come back. Um, you're
[00:09:51] Mallory Lee: already so emotional as it's,
[00:09:53] Sydney Mulligan: I was already so emotional. It just felt like a huge betrayal. Like her
[00:09:57] Mallory Lee: Yeah.
[00:09:57] Sydney Mulligan: Time with her kid was treated as more important somehow than my time with my kid. And, you know, there's a lot that goes into those decisions, but it was, that was really, really painful for me.
[00:10:08] Sydney Mulligan: I was also fortunate that my husband got. Paternity leave, which I recognize that not everyone does. But he worked for, um, capital One. He still works for Capital One and they offer a pretty good paternity leave. I think it was like four months. Uh, and we staggered our leave. Wow. So we took a little bit together and then when I went back, he had our son full-time for a few months, uh, which was nice 'cause we were kicking the can down the road on starting to pay for daycare.
[00:10:35] Sydney Mulligan: Sure. Um, we also, when we started researching daycares. I mean, I don't think anyone really knows what daycare is like until you have to start researching daycare. But we really did not know right. What this was like. All we knew was that he had a Bright Horizons benefit through work that like you get like some sort of preferred enrollment, like come off the wait list faster if you work at Capital One.
[00:11:02] Sydney Mulligan: We were like, okay, so let's go look at Bright Horizon. There's Bright Horizons a few blocks away. Wow. Wow.
[00:11:07] Shannon Curran: Yeah.
[00:11:08] Sydney Mulligan: We were on the tour and I was like, oh, like this place is nice. Like they're,
[00:11:12] Shannon Curran: yeah, better be.
[00:11:12] Sydney Mulligan: They're like telling me about their STEM program for babies and all this. I was like, I think I could leave my baby here.
[00:11:20] Sydney Mulligan: I think I can get on board with this. And then at the end they put a little piece of paper in my hand. They're like, this is our tuition. Let us know if you have any questions. And in the infant room. In Manhattan at Bright Horizons, it was $3,600 a month for full-time care. Which was the same as our rent, which was, oh my
[00:11:40] Mallory Lee: goodness,
[00:11:41] Sydney Mulligan: in 20 double our rent already in North Carolina, and this was seven years ago.
[00:11:47] Sydney Mulligan: Uh,
[00:11:48] Mallory Lee: if, if they call it tuition, you know,
[00:11:51] Sydney Mulligan: you are
[00:11:51] Mallory Lee: about to fall
[00:11:52] Sydney Mulligan: over, you're about be
[00:11:53] Mallory Lee: like,
[00:11:53] Sydney Mulligan: yeah,
[00:11:55] Shannon Curran: yeah.
[00:11:55] Sydney Mulligan: Is there a
[00:11:55] Shannon Curran: fafsa? Is there a FAFSA program that I can
[00:11:58] Sydney Mulligan: sign up for? Can I get a Propel grant for a base? Like I've never felt poor as a working professional dual income hustle. But now I realize that I don't got it like that, and I just came home and cried.
[00:12:11] Sydney Mulligan: Like, I was like, I don't, I have no idea what we're gonna do. Like an au pair is such a lovely idea, but we don't have an extra bedroom for an au pair, right? We live in a 600 square foot apartment. Like there's no, there's, there's no place for the three of us to go. A nanny in New York is like a thousand dollars a week minimum.
[00:12:28] Sydney Mulligan: That's more than daycare. So we started looking around at like, do we move to an outer borough? Do we go somewhere else? Do we have to just go back to North Carolina? Like, it was so disheartening that we felt just so woefully unprepared for having a baby at all. But like the actual impact of having a baby in New York, we had no idea.
[00:12:51] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah. But we end up finding a really lovely in-home daycare. Fully licensed in-home daycare. That was $600 a week. And it was What a bargain. What a bargain. We did have to walk a mile to it, but it was, it did feel like an incredible, incredible bargain. So I got through that. I survived it. I got my kid in the daycare.
[00:13:16] Sydney Mulligan: We were like doing okay, and then COVID happened and then. The vaccines came out and we all got vaccinated and we were like allowed to be in each other's homes again and like reenter society and we're feeling good. Yeah, it was like a very optimistic time in New York, the spring of 2021. So of course my husband and I were like, probably time to have another baby.
[00:13:35] Sydney Mulligan: Let's do it. Why not? Why not? What if we had one on purpose? Wouldn't that be cute? Well, we had that thought and then I was pregnant and. About five seconds. Yeah, so
[00:13:45] Mallory Lee: magical.
[00:13:46] Sydney Mulligan: Great. Great work everybody, and I'm super excited. Part of the reason that I decided I was ready is I knew that before I had another baby, I needed to be somewhere that would give me much more maternity leaves than I had before.
[00:13:59] Sydney Mulligan: I, like, I could not do 12 weeks again. I was in no way going to do that. So I left my job and I found a company that had six months of fully paid maternity leave. Wow. In addition to the six months of fully paid maternity leave, they also had a childcare benefit. They covered childcare. $3,000 a month per kid.
[00:14:21] Sydney Mulligan: What? Wow. Kids. Whoa. Yeah. I saw this job posting with these benefits and I was like, I will be a janitor here. Like I don't, what do you want?
[00:14:32] Shannon Curran: Hell, I'll
[00:14:32] Sydney Mulligan: do it.
[00:14:32] Mallory Lee: Hell,
[00:14:33] Sydney Mulligan: I'll learn it. I don't care. I'll learn it. Exactly. So I got the drum started. Love it. I. Just as a little side note, started on January 6th, 2021.
[00:14:44] Sydney Mulligan: So that was a, an eventful, eventful first day. So I got the job. We found a new apartment. It was the middle of COVID when no one wanted to live in New York. So I found a much bigger apartment for the same price we were already paying, and it was rent stabilized, which I did not know what that meant at the time.
[00:15:02] Sydney Mulligan: But in New York, rent stabilization means that. The city has a board that sets how much your rent can be increased each year. And the mayor points the board, so it's like very much controlled by the mayor, how much they'll raise your rent. But it is never more than like, I don't remember, 8%, something like that.
[00:15:21] Sydney Mulligan: So we got a three bed, two bath and door band building. We did. We're finally, you've arrived finally, like ahead of the game. We got it under control now. We were in, uh. 600 square foot, two bedroom apartment that was a third floor walk up before. So this felt like a tremendous upgrade. So we had the apartment, we had the job we had, I knew that we would be able to cover childcare if I had a second kid.
[00:15:47] Sydney Mulligan: I had like additional childcare benefit. My husband's job was going well, but he decided to get a new job later in the year too. So when I was like seven months pregnant, he got a new job and everything seemed like it was going great. Then at the end of December, 2021, Omicron hit New York. So everyone's had COVID again.
[00:16:11] Sydney Mulligan: My husband got COVID like on Christmas day and. With my son, I had a C-section because he was breach, so I did the whole thing, you know? Really?
[00:16:25] Shannon Curran: Wow. This is weird. Okay, continue. This is weird. Sorry Mallory
[00:16:29] Sydney Mulligan: to, I
[00:16:29] Mallory Lee: love
[00:16:29] Shannon Curran: it. Are we this slow?
[00:16:31] Sydney Mulligan: That's, should I go my black glass?
[00:16:34] Mallory Lee: I didn't know about the two breach thing, so Yeah, that's weird.
[00:16:38] Mallory Lee: That even to me is a surprise. That's
[00:16:39] Sydney Mulligan: super weird. Yep. So I ended up having a super fast laborer. I did end up doing the vbac, but I did also have a placental abruption, which was scary, but ended up fine. And then I'm heading in on my six months of maternity leave. I was like. We did it, Joe, six months. Like let's, let's do this.
[00:17:01] Sydney Mulligan: Let's go
[00:17:01] Shannon Curran: summer. You see you in the summer, you know, like
[00:17:03] Sydney Mulligan: there is, yes. You see you sometime next year. My husband had eight weeks I think, of parental leave at his new job. He had only been at the company for about two months before Ellie was born. Um, and he'd only been on his team for like six weeks.
[00:17:19] Sydney Mulligan: They had some sort of like mandatory all company training or whatever before you join your team and. When he returned to work, he, his first day back from parental leave, he got put on a pit, which in retrospect is illegal. Someone else joined at the same time as him, and that person at the end of the year thing got too new to rate and he got put on a pit.
[00:17:44] Sydney Mulligan: So that was the
[00:17:47] Shannon Curran: performance of being at work shady.
[00:17:49] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah, it was not, it didn't make a lot of sense, but that was really, really hard for him. Like emotionally, everything. Yeah. And you know, like we had the second baby. We're like, we're ready this time. And then that happens for him. And then two weeks after that, I get a 10 minute meeting from HR put on my calendar and I was like,
[00:18:09] Mallory Lee: shut up.
[00:18:10] Sydney Mulligan: Excuse me. This conflicts with babying me yoga. I will not be there. You can't put meetings on my calendar while I am on maternity leave. My boss was like, okay, I can move it to tomorrow. And then I was like, what is this? And he was like, I can't tell you. And I was like, well,
[00:18:30] Mallory Lee: oh shit,
[00:18:31] Sydney Mulligan: here we go. Um, and I had heard, you know, I started hearing from some of my colleagues that like, this person got let go.
[00:18:37] Sydney Mulligan: This person got like, oh, this person got let go. This person got let go because Ellie came three weeks early. I missed my one year anniversary at the company by two days. So my, I joined on January 20, January 6th, 2021, and she was born January 4th, 2022. And because of that, I was not technically protected by FMLA.
[00:18:57] Sydney Mulligan: I don't think it would've mattered because FMLA can't really protect you in a mass layoff anyway. And they laid off like a hundred people, but I was one of them and I, it was kind of funny. When I went back to work after my oldest, I had been promoted while I was on leave and I was now managing people for the first time.
[00:19:20] Sydney Mulligan: And it was kind of emotionally interesting to like be in this transition into motherhood. And now I also have all of these children at work to take care of. Mm-hmm.
[00:19:29] Uh,
[00:19:29] Sydney Mulligan: and I felt like kind of maternal towards them, which was funny because most of them were my age, were older than me. And at my new job, I was also given a direct report pretty quickly because my boss that hired me quit on my fourth day.
[00:19:43] Sydney Mulligan: Um, and they gave me the intern to backfill her because that seemed like it was the same level of support for no additional money. Adequate. Um, but I felt very much like I needed to care for her because she was losing me. And she was like, I don't understand why. They're letting you go. You're on maternity leave and like, why wouldn't they let me go if they only need one MOPS person?
[00:20:09] Sydney Mulligan: And I was like, girl, I know how to, they pay you. I know how much they pay me. I'm drawing healthcare for a family of four and two times childcare benefit. Like if this is about money,
[00:20:22] Shannon Curran: right?
[00:20:22] Sydney Mulligan: I'm costing them a lot more. Yeah. So she stayed for a little bit longer and then I ended up getting help. One, I didn't get her a job, she got her own job.
[00:20:28] Sydney Mulligan: I made an introduction for her to the company I'd worked at before. And she got out there too. But now I want maternity leave with no job to go back to of all the ways that could have gone. It was incredibly shitty. It was incredibly shitty. They should not have done that. Did they at Incredibly shitty.
[00:20:46] Sydney Mulligan: Did they at pay out? They'd made my termination date, the date that I was supposed to come back. So I still was technically employed for my full leave. I was still paid my salary. I still drew childcare for chance. I was still, I was okay. I still got my leave and I got four weeks of severance, which for everyone else is pretty shitty severance, but for me it was okay.
[00:21:11] Sydney Mulligan: So I got seven months of maternity leave. What I learned about myself, that's
[00:21:15] Mallory Lee: like 10% better than what they should have done. Like it's this much better.
[00:21:20] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah. I mean, still shitty. It was incredibly shitty. It was incredibly shitty because now I have to spend my leave. Finding job for a job. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:28] Sydney Mulligan: And I actually
[00:21:28] Shannon Curran: have a friend, this same thing happened to, it's funny, we'll, we'll have her on the podcast. Yeah. She's a,
[00:21:33] Sydney Mulligan: yeah.
[00:21:34] Shannon Curran: Very similar situation. Yep.
[00:21:35] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Shannon Curran: Wow.
[00:21:37] Sydney Mulligan: But Ellie was like six weeks old. I was,
[00:21:40] Shannon Curran: oh God,
[00:21:41] Sydney Mulligan: leaving the house for the first time. And this happened and I didn't, I was like, I have time. I don't wanna worry about this right now.
[00:21:48] Sydney Mulligan: Like I, I'll look for a job later. But I also felt like. Because it was such a mass layoff, there was like all of these people that are like sharing resources and like, what kind of job are you looking for? I see this, I see this, I see this. I was like, I feel like I can't miss the wave of support that's happening right now.
[00:22:05] Sydney Mulligan: If I wait until the summer, then like everyone's gonna have a job except for me. So I started applying, putting things out there, and I did end up with a few job offers, one of which I was pretty sure I was gonna take. At a company that seemed like they really wanted me and I really liked them. They sent me a Taylor Swift Care package to try to convince me to drink
[00:22:26] Shannon Curran: women supporting women.
[00:22:27] Shannon Curran: Thank
[00:22:28] Sydney Mulligan: you. Women supporting women, we love it. They're wonderful. That's fun. Yeah, super fun. But I also had Lauren, who I barely knew, Lauren Eino. We really only knew of each other because we were Marketo champions at the same time. And because we have a mutual friend whose name is Kimmy Corrigan. Kimmy used to be my client, and Kimmy used to be Lauren's coworker at different companies.
[00:22:52] Sydney Mulligan: Okay. Lauren and I follow each other on Instagram and had just like a little bit talked before. And then I posted on LinkedIn that I was laid off and I was looking for a new job and she reached, she slid into my Instagram dms and was like,
[00:23:06] Mallory Lee: nice.
[00:23:06] Sydney Mulligan: What kind of job are you looking for? What do you wanna do?
[00:23:08] Sydney Mulligan: Tell me about your hopes and dreams. What do you want out of life? And we just talked for a while. She had been freelancing for a little while. She was actually a freelancer when I worked at the agency I used to work at. She worked at a direct competitor. I was always like a W2 employee and she was always a freelancer, even at the agency.
[00:23:26] Sydney Mulligan: And she left, um, in part because they wanted her to become a full-time employee. And she was like, I want that. And I was like, why wouldn't you want that? That's like security. That's health insurance. That's like. A paycheck and she was like, I can make way more money as a contractor and I don't want anyone to tell me that I have to sit at my desk from nine to five.
[00:23:48] Sydney Mulligan: Like, I, she valued the flexibility much more of being a contractor, um, than a W2 employee. Yeah. So I was like, okay. She had an idea to grow her freelance practice into more of an agency that was specifically dealt for freelancers. Um, and I was like, well, that sounds awful because. I don't even wanna be a freelancer, like who wants to do this?
[00:24:12] Sydney Mulligan: And she was like, trust me, there are a lot, they're out there of people that want to work this way. So after like I'm doing all these job interviews and like getting shitty offers, I'm getting good offers, like trying to figure out what are we gonna do. I reached out to her and I was like, if we, if you actually wanna talk about doing something together, then we should probably meet in person for the first time in our lives if she lives in Cleveland.
[00:24:33] Sydney Mulligan: I was like, I'll come to Cleveland, I'll just bring Ellie with me and we'll talk. And she was like. Cleveland in March is not a place you wanna be. Why don't we go somewhere fun? Let's go to Florida. So we went to Siesta Keith, Florida. We stayed in a mermaid themed Airbnb. I brought Ellie with me. She was about four months old at the time.
[00:24:55] Sydney Mulligan: I rented a SNOO from Baby Quip.
[00:24:58] Mallory Lee: Oh, nice.
[00:24:58] Sydney Mulligan: We just figured it out. We like bought a bunch of post-it notes at the corner store and just like wrote down all the stuff that. We liked about the agencies we worked at, all the stuff we didn't like, all the people that we would wanna work with if we could make it happen.
[00:25:12] Sydney Mulligan: And I went into that trip with a job offer. I was pretty sure I was gonna take somewhere else at the, with the people. They gave me the Taylor Swift Care package and I left and I was like, give me a week to think about it. And then I was not even on the plane and I texted her and I was like, let's just do it.
[00:25:32] Sydney Mulligan: In the end, I was like, there's a million opportunities to just get a job, which is easy to say before the job work can implode. But this was mid 2022 that was like a vintage tech bubble layoff. So was I. And I was clearly, clearly I can get a job. I got job offers, I could get a job. If this doesn't go well, I'll just get a job.
[00:25:53] Sydney Mulligan: But how many opportunities do you have to build something from scratch? That's your own. You can really make it be what you wanted. And the company that I worked at that was so small, one of the things that I loved the most was being part of building a company. And I, at the time, I like didn't really, I didn't really care that it wasn't mine.
[00:26:09] Sydney Mulligan: I was just like loved being part of something. But in the end, I saw all the reasons that like, if it's not yours, then you're not really building it. You're not really making the decisions. You're implementing someone else's vision and you're like on board with it or you're not. Um. So we, we started IMing.
[00:26:25] Sydney Mulligan: I took my full maternity leave and I took my severance. I like the last month. That was my severance. I worked a little bit part-time and then I started full-time in August, 2022. And it took off way faster than we thought it was going to. We were like, this is gonna be fun. How cute. A lifestyle business.
[00:26:43] Sydney Mulligan: We'll, just like
[00:26:44] Shannon Curran: I said, the
[00:26:45] Sydney Mulligan: same thing. Once it gets too big, we'll just like start turning clients away. Of course we didn't do that. No, it's no
[00:26:50] Shannon Curran: many. They
[00:26:51] Sydney Mulligan: cute. No, that's. Way, way more than we thought it was gonna be. We hired people, like hired internal people to work on EMMIEfor the first time last year, which was crazy.
[00:27:00] Sydney Mulligan: Oh wow. So my third baby is also growing up, entering adolescence. That's
[00:27:05] Mallory Lee: crazy.
[00:27:06] Sydney Mulligan: Her name is EMMIECollective.
[00:27:08] Shannon Curran: I love
[00:27:09] Mallory Lee: that. And how many people are in the freelance like network for Emmy?
[00:27:14] Sydney Mulligan: Uh, we have about 75 people that are actively working with us today. Wow. Yeah.
[00:27:20] Mallory Lee: That's awesome. Wow.
[00:27:22] Sydney Mulligan: So if she was right, that's
[00:27:23] Mallory Lee: simple.
[00:27:23] Sydney Mulligan: There are people that wanna work this way.
[00:27:28] Shannon Curran: That was the main crux of the the strategic product market fit situation that you had to figure out.
[00:27:33] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah. Yes.
[00:27:35] Shannon Curran: Yeah.
[00:27:36] Mallory Lee: Oh wow. That is an amazing story. So many twists and turns that I didn't even know. It's awesome.
[00:27:44] Shannon Curran: Mallory also brought, she like also didn't take a maternity, like this is something I didn't know about her.
[00:27:48] Shannon Curran: Like never really took a maternity leave mal. Like you
[00:27:51] Mallory Lee: never had one.
[00:27:51] Shannon Curran: Why?
[00:27:52] Mallory Lee: No,
[00:27:53] Shannon Curran: she just kept working.
[00:27:54] Mallory Lee: Well she
[00:27:54] Shannon Curran: was allergic.
[00:27:55] Mallory Lee: I just, I don't know. So like similar to you, Sydnee, my first pregnancy, I was working in a small business that had never had a pregnant. Person before. And so they were like, we'll do whatever you want.
[00:28:10] Mallory Lee: We don't know how to do maternity leave. Tell us how to do it. And so I was like, okay, maybe I'll plan my own leave. I'll figure something out. And the company was small enough that they didn't qualify for any of the laws of like, oh, I have to give you X, Y, and Z. Yeah, you have to
[00:28:24] Sydney Mulligan: have like
[00:28:25] Mallory Lee: 50
[00:28:25] Sydney Mulligan: employees within five miles
[00:28:26] Mallory Lee: qualify.
[00:28:28] Sydney Mulligan: Exactly. Does
[00:28:28] Mallory Lee: anyone have that? Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:30] Sydney Mulligan: Anymore.
[00:28:31] Mallory Lee: Wow. Maybe
[00:28:32] Sydney Mulligan: we're all
[00:28:33] Mallory Lee: virtual. But long story short, I also kind of wanted to try being a stay at home mom, and so mm-hmm. Instead of trying to invent my own maternity leave and do this whole thing, I was like, Hey guys, I'm actually just not gonna come back.
[00:28:47] Mallory Lee: And so I resigned. Tried being a stay at home mom.
[00:28:51] Sydney Mulligan: Mallory,
[00:28:52] Mallory Lee: pretty, you're
[00:28:52] Sydney Mulligan: supposed to resign after your first day back. That's what I said. That's what I said after paid for your leave.
[00:28:57] Mallory Lee: She's too good.
[00:28:59] Sydney Mulligan: Who
[00:28:59] Mallory Lee: would give advice at
[00:29:00] Sydney Mulligan: advice at this time?
[00:29:02] Mallory Lee: I don't know. I think I felt bad, honestly. I think I felt bad and so patriarchy I return, I have like not done that, but.
[00:29:09] Mallory Lee: So I started consulting pretty much right away. Mostly 'cause I wanted to stay on the company phone plan. Long story. Um, I love this part of the, the story.
[00:29:17] Shannon Curran: I forgot, how did I already forget?
[00:29:19] Mallory Lee: I don't know. I was like, I'll still help you out. Like on a monthly basis. I wanna stay on the phone plan. You pay me a little money, I'll be around.
[00:29:27] Mallory Lee: And it worked out fine. My fun plans
[00:29:28] Shannon Curran: are not expensive. Correct. That's the
[00:29:31] Mallory Lee: funniest part of the story. I know, I know. It was like it matter to her, a security thing for me. I don't even know. It mattered to me. Don't know why it did. So I was like quickly consulting, even though I was a stay at home mom and I came back to do that.
[00:29:45] Mallory Lee: I mean after like a few weeks it was weird. And so no maternity leave. But then I was picking up other consulting clients and eventually I started getting some childcare. Bennett, our second one, he was born when I was a consultant full. I don't know, whatever full-time. So I had childcare, but still not much of a leave because I had these clients that were like, the world was gonna end if I was unavailable.
[00:30:11] Sydney Mulligan: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:11] Mallory Lee: Uh, that kind of thing. And so at some point when Bennett was a little bit older, I did go back to work full-time and I was at Cheetah Digital and had full-time childcare, went back to work full-time. I was consulting for Cheetah and they hired me. That turned out to be insane. So. I actually quit when I was like 30 something weeks pregnant because my blood pressure was like untenable, like couldn't deal.
[00:30:42] Mallory Lee: They were. Stressing me out so much I just had to leave 'cause it was like literally unsafe for me and my unborn child to, to work there. And so that one also, no maternity leave because I left, you know, before he came. And then, but I did have like a nicer break because we had the au pair at home with us.
[00:31:01] Mallory Lee: And so I had lots of downtime with Cohen. I remember that. And I wasn't consulting because I thought, okay, I wanna go back full time. After some point in time, but then I did start consulting, but then I did go back full time and I had to bring him with me. She's a consultant.
[00:31:17] Shannon Curran: Fail constantly. Shelia like
[00:31:19] Mallory Lee: always.
[00:31:19] Mallory Lee: I'm a big, I'm a consultant. Fail and a stay at home mom. Fail.
[00:31:24] Shannon Curran: Yes,
[00:31:24] Mallory Lee: she is.
[00:31:24] Shannon Curran: She keeps adopting her clients.
[00:31:27] Sydney Mulligan: Oh my gosh.
[00:31:28] Mallory Lee: I did that three times. I tried to be a consultant and they hired me anyway. You less great. No true maternity leave, but it's, wow. It's okay. It worked out fine. Worked out fine.
[00:31:37] You're
[00:31:38] Sydney Mulligan: here now today.
[00:31:38] Mallory Lee: Uh, we're here today. I, okay, so I have a question for you, Sydnee. Okay. You are a business owner, right? You've gone through all of these interesting scenarios with your time off and having children and like making all of this work. And I'm just wondering like how do you personally feel like if someone who works for you tells you, Hey boss, I'm pregnant.
[00:32:03] Mallory Lee: Or if it's a freelancer and they're like, Hey, I need to take this break because I'm having a baby. Like what are the range of emotions that you go through when someone delivers this Sno to you having gone through all this stuff you've gone through?
[00:32:16] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah, that's a great question. From a business owner perspective, it is like, well, shit, what are we gonna do from a fellow human, from a mom?
[00:32:25] Sydney Mulligan: Like an incredible amount of empathy. I, what's sort of interesting about the freelancers is like they don't get maternity leave. Like they just don't, that's not how freelancing works. But one thing we do offer for our freelancers is like if they need to take some time off to care for a child or to do whatever we can.
[00:32:43] Sydney Mulligan: Have someone fill in for them on their clients with the promise that the work will be there when they come back. Uh, so it's not paid maternity leave, but it is the, it's the security that your, your clients can come back to you when you're ready to come back to work. Okay. And your clients can be taken care of while you're gone.
[00:32:57] Sydney Mulligan: So you're not having to juggle all these clients that are like the world's coming in if I am not available to support them. Mm-hmm. We also do a lot of maternity leave coverages for other companies. So like, when. Your MOPS person, your ops person is going out on maternity leave. We step in really often to backfill them while they're gone.
[00:33:15] Sydney Mulligan: And the way that we pitch that and set it up for our clients is you should plan for one month of coverage before they go out and plan for one month of coverage when they come back. Because they can go out early. You need some cross training time and then same on the other side. They might come back later.
[00:33:31] Sydney Mulligan: We've absolutely had that happen. I'm gonna take two more weeks, I'm gonna take another month, whatever it is, and it like. Keeps them supported, make sure they're not coming back to a dumpster fire. Often we think companies that are like not really backfilling someone that's on leave, and it just means that you are doing all of the work that piled up when you get back.
[00:33:47] Sydney Mulligan: Like you can't really just dissipate someone's responsibilities to a bunch of different people and think it's gonna be okay. Um, yeah. If someone at Emmy. If needed maternity leave, we would figure it the fuck out, I guess. But it would be, it would be hard. It would be really hard. But I think that while the short-term cost of paying for someone to be on leave is high, it is an incredible long-term investment in your team and their loyalty to your organization.
[00:34:16] Sydney Mulligan: Uh, if you're like expecting them to have loyalty to you, like you have to show loyalty to them in return. Mm-hmm. That's how I feel about it. That's great.
[00:34:24] Shannon Curran: I think we often talk about that this is a system, not a person, right? Like the system of the United States working system just does not support for maternity leave.
[00:34:32] Shannon Curran: Like we've all been on the back end of, like, I ended up covering at my first like big tech job. I covered a five month maternity leave and it ruined my life. Mm-hmm. Like I, I had, I had to leave after I was so burnt out. I felt very, and then this person came back and I had like done their job for five months and they were my boss and they were like, all right, bye.
[00:34:53] Shannon Curran: Like no longer in the leadership team meetings, like no longer in the, and like, so it felt horrible, right? Like and so, but like how do you deal with it otherwise? I don't know. Right. Like I do think I cover maternity leave sometimes too with clients. And I think that probably is the best way to do it, is to have like, like a time blocked consultant that is in their third party support them party.
[00:35:12] Shannon Curran: Um, not just like. Spread their work around to the rest of the organization. Right? Like in Bulgaria, they get a year off. It just isn't the situation,
[00:35:20] Sydney Mulligan: right. It's
[00:35:20] Shannon Curran: just, you know what I mean? That happens here, it's
[00:35:22] Sydney Mulligan: just not the
[00:35:22] Shannon Curran: same. So it's, it's on business owners. It's
[00:35:24] Sydney Mulligan: a problem we're asking. Yeah, we, it's the problem we're asking business owners to solve, even small business owners to solve.
[00:35:30] Sydney Mulligan: That should be handled by the government. Like this is what the government
[00:35:34] Shannon Curran: is for, right, for the system in general. Yes. Whether the, you know, like whatever you believe, right? But like we just systemically have not figured out how to support parents and in, well, I don't, I'm not gonna get into this in a capitalist society, but truly because that is work that is not paid, that is unpaid labor.
[00:35:49] Shannon Curran: Right? Which, so that. Oh yeah. But yet somehow we all are born, you know what I mean? Like, we're all born from somebody. So like it is a really, yeah, and I've said this too about like my husband also had leave and I, I say all the time, you cannot have women in leadership if you do not have e like equitable leave for their partners because I could not have come back to work if I did not have my husband on leave, so.
[00:36:11] Shannon Curran: Mm-hmm. It's 'cause that made him. Primary parent for multiple months, right? Mm-hmm. Like that is, so now we are both primary parent all the time. We are equ like because he got used to being a parent without asking how I would do it. Mm-hmm. Right? Like there's, yeah, it is definitely a really hard, I have a, that's a really good question, Mallory.
[00:36:31] Shannon Curran: I have a lot of empathy for specifically small business owners that have to deal with this stuff. It's really hard.
[00:36:36] Mallory Lee: Yeah, it is hard, but I think it's really cool that for people who do want that flexibility, sydnee, that's what you guys offer to people. And so,
[00:36:45] Shannon Curran: yeah,
[00:36:46] Mallory Lee: that is an amazing thing. I think that maybe if I had worked with you guys, maybe I would not have been such a consultant.
[00:36:53] Mallory Lee: Fail. Uh. Maybe would've turned out differently.
[00:37:03] Sydney Mulligan: Goodness. There's a
[00:37:04] Shannon Curran: lot
[00:37:04] Sydney Mulligan: of anxiety with being a freelancer, you know, like feeling like you gotta hold onto your clients, you gotta retain your clients. Like that's your paycheck, right? That's your livelihood and you can't screw it up. But it's tough to not have the air cover of another organization that can provide you the support that you need to make sure you're taken care of in those situations too.
[00:37:22] Mallory Lee: Yeah.
[00:37:22] Sydney Mulligan: And that's what EMMIECollective does. I love
[00:37:25] Mallory Lee: it. I love it. Go Emmy. Coolest brand by the way. Like, so fun. Thanks. Thanks. If people are not following you, they absolutely need to. Yeah. Pretty funny business. Awesome podcast. Thanks. Highly recommend. I'm not gonna try to get people to follow you on Instagram, but I follow you on Instagram and I love it.
[00:37:44] Sydney Mulligan: You can follow EMMIEcollective on Instagram.
[00:37:47] Mallory Lee: There you go. Follow EMMIECollective. Instagram is prime on Instagram.
[00:37:50] Sydney Mulligan: It should be. Keep it that way.
[00:37:52] Mallory Lee: It should be. But seriously, I just admire you. I love the New York of it all. I see you like biking places with kids on the bike, and I remember one time you even went to Costco and I was like, oh yeah man, what is this woman doing?
[00:38:07] Mallory Lee: You load up my bike at Costco. I, it's just amazing. Wow. It's amazing. I, I can
[00:38:11] Sydney Mulligan: fit $300 worth of groceries from Costco on my bike.
[00:38:15] Shannon Curran: Wow,
[00:38:15] Mallory Lee: this is a badass woman. Heres just, let's just be clear.
[00:38:19] Shannon Curran: I can't, I, I get Instacart delivery from Costco 'cause just going in gives me so much anxiety.
[00:38:26] Mallory Lee: You
[00:38:26] Shannon Curran: gotta, and I live in like in the middle of the woods, Sydnee. I really don't. Oh man. I can't, that is really make you less
[00:38:34] Sydney Mulligan: anxious if you also had to put all your stuff on a bike at the end.
[00:38:37] Shannon Curran: No, no, no. It did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That make it worse. It make
[00:38:39] Sydney Mulligan: much worse. Much worse.
[00:38:40] Shannon Curran: That's, yeah. That would be the, that would be the, the straw that broke.
[00:38:43] Shannon Curran: Yeah. You know, like there would be, I'd be in the middle of the road. It would not
[00:38:46] Sydney Mulligan: be good. I also have, um, very poor spatial awareness. So sometimes I'll like be at Costco and look at my cart and I'd like FaceTime my husband. Be like, is this all gonna fit us? Will, or do I need to put some of this back? He is really good spatial awareness.
[00:38:59] Sydney Mulligan: Fortunately, it's why we're partners.
[00:39:01] Shannon Curran: Yeah.
[00:39:02] Mallory Lee: I think the same thing is true about me and Brian. He's the packer really too. He's the car packer. Mm-hmm.
[00:39:07] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, guys are hard at that. I didn't gather everything that needs to go in and then he tetris it into where it needs to go.
[00:39:13] Shannon Curran: Yeah. That's our dynamic too.
[00:39:14] Shannon Curran: Yeah. My husband's an electrician, so I always planned it on that. Like that's all he does all day is like fit things into each other, you know? Yeah. Like my husband would with math
[00:39:21] Sydney Mulligan: scientist, so, you know.
[00:39:22] Shannon Curran: Oh, should we do our save of the week, Mel? We, I feel like we should, did, did we tell her?
[00:39:27] Sydney Mulligan: Wyatt.
[00:39:28] Shannon Curran: Oh, forgot Sydnee.
[00:39:29] Shannon Curran: We do forgot. We have a small segment in our legal podcast called Save of the Week. Okay. And it is like something, whether it's like, it could be a product, it could be a process, it could be a, anything that saved you as a working mom this week. Um, yeah. Valerie, do you have one or, I
[00:39:44] Mallory Lee: actually do. I actually do.
[00:39:46] Mallory Lee: I
[00:39:46] Shannon Curran: love it. Do you wanna start
[00:39:47] Mallory Lee: while Sydnee dance? I'm prepared, yes. Okay. I'm prepared. So my save of the week just happened like three hours ago. Love and it is Henry's mom. Henry's mom is my savior this week because my kids are off school today. And I was like, okay, the kids are off. We're both working.
[00:40:09] Mallory Lee: I've gotta do podcast stuff. Like what am I gonna do with my kids? Henry's mom texted and asked if Grayson wanted to come play today, and I was like,
[00:40:18] Sydney Mulligan: yes,
[00:40:19] Mallory Lee: he does.
[00:40:20] Shannon Curran: Do you want two other children as well?
[00:40:24] Mallory Lee: I didn't do that to her, but like we, Brian took Grayson over there, so she's my save. She was like, yeah, but bring him over.
[00:40:33] Mallory Lee: I was like, okay. No Henry's mom. No further clarification needed. We're on the way.
[00:40:38] Sydney Mulligan: That's awesome.
[00:40:39] Mallory Lee: So thank you to Henry's mom this
[00:40:41] Sydney Mulligan: week.
[00:40:41] Thank
[00:40:41] Shannon Curran: you. Henrys mom. Um, I, mine is actually a, like a system. This, this time. I, so we are very into snacks right now. We talk about snacks a lot on this podcast. And my son, every morning is, I find that, uh, it's very hard to get him pulled away from the tv, which is fair.
[00:40:59] Shannon Curran: I should probably not let him watch TV before school, but. We watch a little bit. Spider-Man is what he asked for every month. So I am a 2-year-old. A little bit Spider-Man, a little bit
[00:41:08] Mallory Lee: Spider-Man. So don't cry. Sydnee don't cry. We already did that segment.
[00:41:12] Shannon Curran: Sorry baby. So I've now decided, 'cause of course we're in the the time of like wanting to.
[00:41:17] Shannon Curran: He can do things autonomously. I make sure. Yeah. But of course we're in the moment of you do it. Like he tells me to do things and I'm like, Nope. Like you're very able-bodied. Let's do it. And so I moved all of his like kind of compliance snacks for 7:00 AM to a spot where he can reach and they're all organized.
[00:41:33] Shannon Curran: They're always bars. What do you want? A bar? A bar. So what's the bar? Well, so a chocolate chip is what he asked for today, chocolate chip. And so he had a, like, those, like made good bars, which he loves. Mm-hmm. Um, but the good news is he could like. Yeah, just pull it out himself. So I, I, it wasn't, I gave him the wrong one.
[00:41:52] Shannon Curran: 'cause that happens a lot with two year olds where it's, oh, that's not the one I wanted. We'll see. And it's like, great, you picked it. So he has his own little containers and he fixed it out and he, this morning picked it out and then had me hold it while I walked down the stairs, which was fine, but it in the car and was the happiest guy in the world.
[00:42:05] Shannon Curran: So I think, uh, having like a little part of the cabinet where he can go in himself. And I know that most people do this. This is not like new information, but it really helped with me not picking the wrong things for him. 'cause he picked it himself. So it was, I love that the chocolate chip really got us and a little bit Spider-Man.
[00:42:22] Shannon Curran: You a
[00:42:23] Sydney Mulligan: chocolate chip, but I eat a little bit of Spider-Man. So cute. My save of the week is a also a system slash a product. The product is part of the system. Okay. Yeah. I came up with this at the beginning of the school year and it has been my save of the week for many, many weeks. It is the smartest thing I've ever done for my household.
[00:42:43] Sydney Mulligan: Wow. I, each of my children, five packing cubes, they all, chances are green, all of Ellie's are pink. On Sundays, we fold all their laundry and they pick out their outfits for the week. Had the same problem with Ellie in particular, did not like the dresses I was picking out for her in the mornings. Chance wouldn't like the shirt that I pulled out of his closet, but he didn't wanna go pick it out himself.
[00:43:06] Sydney Mulligan: A whole argument every day. Now they fill them for the week.
[00:43:10] Shannon Curran: Wow.
[00:43:10] Sydney Mulligan: We keep them in a cabinet in the entertainment center because they get dressed in the living room. Okay. And they're responsible for getting their packing cube. Picking which packing cube they're gonna wear today. Put on their clothes. It's got everything down to socks and underwear, and then putting their packing cube back in their dresser and putting their PJs in the dirty clothes.
[00:43:30] Mallory Lee: I
[00:43:30] Shannon Curran: love
[00:43:31] Mallory Lee: that.
[00:43:32] Sydney Mulligan: It's this next level parenting.
[00:43:34] Shannon Curran: It's wonderful. It's wonderful.
[00:43:36] Mallory Lee: It feels free to steal. Feels very not
[00:43:37] Sydney Mulligan: trademarked. Won't sue you.
[00:43:43] Mallory Lee: We haven't been sued. We've just been threatened. That's different. That's
[00:43:46] Shannon Curran: the first time to be clear. We were warned.
[00:43:51] Mallory Lee: No, if they ever hear this, if the Royal Day, if they ever hear this, we love them. We, we love them. We're not mad. We're not mad. We just think, think it's mom supporting mom that we. We are illegal now, so we're gonna fix it.
[00:44:04] Dinner,
[00:44:04] Sydney Mulligan: we're getting there.
[00:44:05] Mallory Lee: Yeah, we love you. Moms in Tech. Okay. I really like that. Save. I like that idea. I've done something similar where I lay out all the boys outfits for the week on a big counter in our laundry room. Um, but it takes up the entire effing counter 'cause I don't have cues. I need cube.
[00:44:22] Mallory Lee: Yeah. Your pet
[00:44:23] Sydney Mulligan: cubes. Mm-hmm.
[00:44:25] Mallory Lee: Brilliant.
[00:44:25] Sydney Mulligan: I think my Amazon affiliate link to the ones that purchased.
[00:44:29] Mallory Lee: We'll put your a affiliate. My front in show notes
[00:44:31] Sydney Mulligan: link. Check my check my LTK. Love it.
[00:44:36] Mallory Lee: No, we really will put your affiliate link in the show notes because you should, should, okay. I don't see, see, I wanna know how many people adopt your strategy here.
[00:44:45] Mallory Lee: I wanna know too.
[00:44:46] Sydney Mulligan: This is for tracking
[00:44:47] Mallory Lee: purposes. The tracking ut me. It's for tracking.
[00:44:49] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah. You gotta ut it.
[00:44:52] Mallory Lee: This is where the tech part comes in.
[00:44:54] Sydney Mulligan: Mm-hmm. You know? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:44:55] Mallory Lee: Mm-hmm. Oh, Sydnee, we love you. This was so fun. Thank you. Thanks for having
[00:44:59] Sydney Mulligan: me. This was so fun.
[00:45:01] Mallory Lee: Thanks for coming. And uh, by the time this airs, we'll, a new podcast name.
[00:45:06] Shannon Curran: We'll have
[00:45:06] Mallory Lee: a new, new, I can subscribe to something. Dunno what it is. All
[00:45:10] Shannon Curran: right, well, we'll sleep. Talk to you soon. Bye friends.
[00:45:13] Mallory Lee: Bye.
[00:45:16] Shannon Curran: Thanks for listening to Full Stack Moms.
[00:45:18] Mallory Lee: We'll be back with more episodes that help you see you're not crazy and you're not alone. If we might be your people, please make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:45:29] Shannon Curran: You know what's crazy about these headphones? I can't think I, 'cause I can't hear myself. You don't hear. It's like I'm saying, saying weird words. I'm saying weird words. So this is a weird episode.
[00:45:37] Sydney Mulligan: We started recording our podcast in a studio last year, and the first time we did it, I was like, this is weird, man.
[00:45:44] Sydney Mulligan: It's way too quiet in here. Like, I can't, I feel like I can't, oh
[00:45:47] Mallory Lee: yeah.
[00:45:47] Sydney Mulligan: I can't be funny. Like I'm laughing too loud at myself. I can't, I don't know what to do.
[00:45:52] Shannon Curran: Wait, that makes me feel better. So, I'm so sorry for the listeners of this episode. I have said some weird stuff because I don't know, I'm here.
[00:46:00] Sydney Mulligan: I can't hear myself.
[00:46:00] Sydney Mulligan: Yeah,
[00:46:02] Mallory Lee: I can hear myself like decently. Okay. Maybe my noise canceling is not turned on.
[00:46:08] Sydney Mulligan: Mm.
[00:46:08] Shannon Curran: Oh, I don't know. I, I just took the link that you sent me, Mallory and I bought the thing. 'cause anything Mallory tells me to do, I just do it. So there's no, that's
[00:46:15] Sydney Mulligan: smart. That sounds like good advice
[00:46:16] Shannon Curran: just for the general public.
[00:46:17] Shannon Curran: I
[00:46:18] Sydney Mulligan: delegate this as a making trust, except Mary tells you not to take maternity leave. You shouldn't listen to that. That's bad.
[00:46:22] Mallory Lee: Yeah. Don't, don't do maternity leave like me, other than, well, she doesn't tell
[00:46:26] Sydney Mulligan: anyone to do that. She just
[00:46:27] Mallory Lee: did it.
[00:46:27] Sydney Mulligan: That's, yeah. She suffers in silence. Yeah,
[00:46:30] Mallory Lee: yeah, yeah.
[00:46:32] Shannon Curran: It's fine.