Applicant #61: Lisa Matson

Lisa Matson is a mom from Bothell.

My video application:

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A bit about me:

Hi I’m Lisa. I’m a 41 year-old “Seattleite”. I’ve lived my whole life in the area and wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve been married to my best friend for 11 years and I get to be a mom to a remarkable 9 year-old girl. We’re lucky to be surrounded by great friends and family. I work part time from home and I’m also the “chief, cook and bottle washer” of the household. And even though my daughter is well passed the “bottle” stage, I find whatever stage she’s in is more fun than the last.

I spent half of my adult life as a career woman in the mortgage industry. It is a challenging, fast paced business and you must be able to constantly think on your feet, since every day is subject to change without notice. (Sound familiar Mom’s?) At the office I could juggle phones, files, faxes and frantic pacing outside my office door all before I even set my purse down in the morning. All-nighters? Bring it on! How was I to know that was just a warm up act to being a mom? When my daughter was 2 years old I decided to stay home with her full time. Being home all day was quite a culture shock after spending most of my waking hours in a busy office surrounded by grown-ups for 10 years. And I have to admit, the first time I faced a full-blown “toddler meltdown” in the middle of Trader Joe’s I wanted to curl up in the fetal position myself.

A bigger culture shock was going from two incomes to primarily one salary. With some creativity, coupons and the help of my “business partners”: Amazon.com, E-bay, Craigslist (to name a few) we’ve been able make it work. I’m also able to get my daughter involved in the process and found that children are some of the best problem solvers I’ve ever met. I may not earn the same paycheck being a stay at home mom as I did as a career girl, but the payoff is priceless.

Bottom line, whether you’re a working mom, single mom or stay at home mom, we all face similar challenges: balancing it all out and trying not to loose ourselves in the process. We all want our children to have it better than we did. And it’s our job as parents to make sure that when they do leave the nest we give them strong enough wings to fly with. (Or, in the case of those of us with thrill seekers on our hands, we teach them how to properly fold their parachutes.)

My blog post:

Allowance vs. “The Exterminator”

My daughter, Kiera, is always looking for ways to earn money. She’s talked me into having garage sales (just for the record, I like to go to them, not have them), bake sales, and lemonade stands. She pet sits and waters gardens for people while they’re out of town. She is even learning to e-bay her old toys, (with assistance of course) all by the ripe old age of nine.

One day, my clever little entrepreneur came to negotiate an allowance. Here’s her plan: she does her chores and we pay her money. Hmmm, let me think, pay her to do her chores, the ones she is already doing. For instance: cleaning her room, unloading the dishwasher and taking out the garbage?! (Isn’t she cute?) Okay, I’m game, so as long as she’s going to pay ME to do her laundry, dishes, cook her three square meals + snacks and taxi her all over the map. (I just can’t bring myself to pay the person who made the mess to clean it up. Call me crazy.) Now, if she wants to come up with another creative solution to make money, one that makes everyone’s life easier and is not part of daily household maintenance, then I’m all ears.

It just so happens that this conversation coincided with Kiera calling me away from making dinner to “save her” from a “scary” bug. (Okay. This being the same kid who freaked out half her soccer team by carrying a dead dragonfly around after practice, uh-huh, right.) “Too scared” we’ll see about that! I made her a deal, she gets the bugs out of the house, dead or alive, (I’m not really all that fussy) and she earns a quarter, with one condition, she doesn’t get paid if she lets them in. So, she dusted off her bug vacuum and off she went. (Yes, they do in fact make a bug vacuum. Go figure.)

A few weeks later she even took it to the next level, all on her own. She ran across a huge wolf spider in the basement she wanted nothing to do with it (I can’t say as I blame her there), but she really wanted that quarter. So she talked her Dad into catching it for her and “releasing it into the wild”. (Now, wait for it….) She paid him 10 cents and she still collected her quarter. BAM! She just aced “Outsourcing 101”.

She’s become quite the bug wrangler, earning upwards of $2.00 per day, I get a bug free house and did I mention she’s not so skittish around bugs anymore? It’s like getting two bugs with one swatter. It’s a win-win all around. (Well, unless of course you’re the bug.)

Life doesn’t come with scripts or dress rehearsals. Sometimes we just make it up as we go along.

Welcome to my world, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Lisa