This November is going to be a "Can she do it?" or, here's hoping, a "She lives to tell the tale!" kind of month for this working mom. You see, it's that time of year. Yes, budget reviews. I'll be, along with our local team, defending our 2011 budget at the end of this month. That, as you can probably imagine, involves a lot of preparation - meetings, spreadsheet reviews, number crunching, creativity, collaboration, and more meetings. In other words, it's a really busy time of year.

So here's the kicker:

My husband is having a similar month. He'll be leaving shortly for a week of global travel. He's training a team on his company's product who don't speak his language. No stress there! When he returns from this trip, he'll have 36 hours on the ground before flying out again the following week. The week after that? You guessed it - more travel.

So what's a working mom with a full workload and a four year old to do?

Panic? No. Plan? Most definitely.

It takes a tremendous amount of planning (and patience) to make this kind of work/life scheduling nightmare not an actual nightmare. Although we do this routinely as a family, my husband's and my schedule had collided at this level of magnitude until now. I'm admittedly unsure how I'll handle it all, although I'm comforted by the fact that if something goes wrong (you can't count on it), I have people in my life that will step in to lend a hand - coworkers, family members and my inner circle of mom friends. It's not going to be easy, but by the time Christmas rolls around, I'll be on the other side of what seems like a trek up Mount Everest at the moment. Until I can enjoy the view, I might as well enjoy the climb.