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Omaha Magazine

Work Hard Play Hard

Mar 27, 2015 12:56PM ● By Allison Janda
Wake up. Get the kids ready. Hurry out the door. Drop kids off. Work eight to five. Pick kids up. Go home. Make dinner. Help with homework. Put kids to bed. Wake up. Repeat. Phew! Making time for oneself can feel like a pipe dream.

Feeling that crunch and hoping to help, Stephanie Feltus created the meet-up group “Working Moms of Omaha” after moving here to take a job in corporate sales. “I did a fair amount of traveling,” says the mother of two children, Lucy, 4, and Gavin, 1. “I began to look for resources supporting working moms and locally, I wasn’t finding many resources.”

The group’s purpose is simple: Moms come together to meet other working moms. The group is currently 300 members strong. Within that membership, small groups with similar interests typically meet just once a month, which makes it easy for even the busiest mothers to partake in the fun. The group meets at a public venue, typically on a Saturday morning with children or on a Sunday evening with women only. Feltus says that, over the years, she has discovered that events involving the children work better during the summer months while events that call for just mothers tend to come together more easily in the winter.

“Our most recent outing was a Holiday Lights Limo Tour for moms only,” she explains. “We met at Upstream [Brewing Company] where the limo picked us up for a two-hour holiday lights tour of Omaha. We sipped on apple cider, chatted, and enjoyed the beauty of the season.”

Feltus, interested in expanding options available to working mothers, hopes to begin planning lunch-and-learn events that focus on achieving work/life balance and reducing the amount of guilt working mothers feel in their day-to-day lives. Currently the only lead organizer, Feltus says that any member of the group is welcome to plan events such as a trip to the zoo or a play date at the museum.

While the group allows working moms to connect and form friendships, it is the raising of children and how much they change that offers a common bond for these women. Their kids range in age from newborns to teenagers, but as all mothers know, motherhood isn’t biased. “This group has taught me to not take parenthood too seriously,” she says. “Your most devastating parenting moment is probably not that bad. This group gives you support and, more importantly, sanity.”

Working Moms of Omaha is funded by a business Feltus owns called Mommy Assistant, which is focused on supporting working families thereby enabling parents to spend more quality time with their kids.

You can join their Facebook page at Working Moms of Omaha as well as the Working Moms of Omaha Meetup Group at meetup.com. “Personally, I have made some fabulous friends and my kids have as well,” Feltus says.

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