Here are some recent headlines about motherhood and the balancing act we all endure:

• First borns get more QT: New study out confirms that first born children get more quality time with parents.
• Marlee Matlin Dances to Her Own Beat: Deaf Actress Proves You Don’t Need Hearing to Listen to the Rhythm.
• Motherhood vs. work: Try both
• Motherhood: is there such a thing as a work-life balance?
• Jenny McCarthy says ‘there isn’t a balance’ between motherhood, work

I love my new job: I am the Easter Bunny. I love all the comes with it. Everything from shopping for the perfect $2 hollow milk chocolate bunny (finally found him — he’s carrying a backpack) to figuring out what we’ll wear Easter Sunday to coloring Easter eggs for the first time with my son. And, I’m so excited about seeing his face as he finds the eggs, toys and trinkets in his Easter basket on Easter morning.

Here are some links to help you make the most of Easter this year.

• How to teach your children the meaning of Easter through making cookies
• Easter blessings — Poetry and scripture celebrating the Easter season
• Jelly Bean prayer
• Activies for Easter from ChildFun.com
  
• 5 fun ways to hunt for Easter eggs from iVillage.com
• 12 ways to paint eggs from Amazingmoms.com
• Easter recipes from Allrecipes.com

Mr. Rogers is one of my all time favorite TV personalities so it is fitting that I honor him on my blog today, the “Won’t You Wear a Sweater? Day.”

Rollins College is honoring Fred Rogers (aka Mr. Rogers) with a celebration of his life, on what would have been his 80th birthday. Mr. Rogers went to college at Rollins in the ’50s.

I remember watching Mr. Rogers when I was a kid. Loving the land of make believe. His gentle nature and soothing voice always captivated me. When my family made a big move, from Canada to Florida, the one constant was that Mr. Rogers was on TV in Florida too!

I’m sure my son would love Mr. Rogers — especially the train. I think I’ll honor Mr. Rogers with a tribute video tonight with the family.

Related:

• “Rollins College Celebrates Life of Fred Rogers” at Rollins.com.
• Orlando Sentinel’s “Rollins strives to preserve neighborly spirit of Mr. Rogers.”
• Mr. Roger’s company, Family Communications.

I found an interesting article the other day that speaks to me as a mom. It’s about the need for career-minded professionals to have a “second life.” I’m not talking about the Web site Second Life, although that certainly can foot the bill in terms of having an alternative to your day-to-day.

Get another life,” by David D. Perlmutter, on Chronicle.com talks mostly about educators and how they balance life on the tenure track with having a family or a hobby, but easily translates to motherhood and the importance of having outside interests.  This could be outside your career or just outside your role as a mother.

David Heenan, a management scholar, makes the intellectual case for having multiple lives — career, personal, communal, spiritual, and even artistic — in his 2002 book Double Lives. He documents how some of history’s most successful (and busy) people found it both necessary and enriching to devote time to alternate forms and forums of creativity that seemed, on the surface, to have nothing to do with their more famous vocations …

Heenan argues that even those of us whose career ambitions are on a lower scale than saving the free world should find a similar “second life.”

Bottom line is this … outside interests have the ability to cleanse the mind and fulfill needs that you may never get from an employer. For SAHMs it can be the window into yourself … doing something you love that has nothing to do with being a mother.

When choosing your “second life,” Perlmutter gives advice, summarized here:

• Whatever you choose, be passionate about it …
• Don’t let your second life be all-consuming …
• The joy of escaping into that second life can lull people into thinking that it can or should be their only vocation. Don’t be like the assistant professor who spent so much time playing computer games and daydreaming about designing new ones that he failed in his tenure bid, and then didn’t find a job in the video-game industry, either.”

Read his full story here.

Tonight is bath night. A big, luxurious Elmo Bubble Bath night. Soaking in a nice, warm tub full to the brim with bubbles. It will be the first bath (or shower) for my son in over a month. Yeah, I’m a bad mom.

NOT. (Well, maybe sometimes.)

No, today my son got his cast off so we going to celebrate with the world’s biggest bubble bath.

I wrote about the adventure that lead to my two-year-old’s broken leg, but little did I know that was the easy part. The tears from the break, the tears from having an x-ray to actually having the cast set. The lifting a 36 lb. boy everywhere for a month to all the sponge baths and trying to wash a toddler’s hair without getting in a bath or shower. That was the easy stuff. For a month, I’ve looked forward to getting the cast off. Having never broken a bone before, I had no idea.

Now I know.

And I don’t want to repeat this process again. EVER.

Let’s just say that having a loud saw come at your leg can’t be comforting, no matter how much your Mommy is whispering in your ear, “It’s OK. It doesn’t hurt. It’s OK. Just a few more minutes. It’s OK. It doesn’t hurt.”

Thank God it’s over. The leg is healed. This adventure is over and it’s time for a relaxing bubble bath. I think I need one now too.