You have a beautiful family. How do you balance your work and home life? Does your husband have a career too? Do you have time for travel and/or hobbies?

Hi Devon, thank you! The work/home life balance is ALWAYS a struggle. It's something that has evolved and gets harder throughout my career: a new job, the addition of a baby, or as the kids get older. DH also works full time so it makes things tricky. I will admit that the first thing to go with everything going on is our hobbies and exercise which is tough. Our window of opportunity is when the kids are asleep - before 6:30am or after 8pm. 

We do and have travelled as a family! It involves recognizing that traveling as a family is a different type of travel than as adults. We've been to Costa Rica (5yo, 2yo, and I was 7 months pg), Norway (7yo, 4yo, and 20 month old), London (same trip as Norway), and lots of road trips. Our last big trip was NYC over spring break with a then 10yo, 7yo, 4yo, and 1yo. We both travel for <25% work, myself as recent as Irvine, CA in Oct and DH to Guam in June. When those big trips come up, we always try to see if we might be able to do a family excursion out of it. That is how we all went to Norway and London, DH had a 6 week work assignment and my buy-in to that was that the rest of us would "pick him up" and do a family trip. We evaluate each opportunity as it comes. 

What has worked well for us is the following:
1) Do what's right for you and your family - I tell this to EVERYONE who is getting married or having children. My family = DH + kids. I choose to have this family so it's my responsibility. My family's needs outweigh my work's and extended family too sometimes, which can be really hard.
2) Work stays at work - We try to stick to our work hours. I've found getting in the habit of working longer hours then becomes the expectation for me, no thanks!
3) Scheduling is KEY - We keep a family Google calendar that is color coded by member, I post the week's family activities and meal plan on a dry erase board, and I'm a stickler for keeping the kids on a schedule as much as possible (8pm bedtime).

I hope this helps!!