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Meet Tracey Cuthbert: She's 39, fiercely devoted to her two children and juggling two part-time careers so she can be home with them most days. And she's one of the last-born Canadian baby boomers.

“I do the best I can around my family,” Ms. Cuthbert says, referring to her husband, Andrew, a 38-year-old electrician, and their children, Graeme, 6, and Andrea, 9. “When I'm busy, it rains, it pours.”

Ms. Cuthbert was the last baby born at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, B.C., at noon on Dec. 31, 1966 — often considered the last year of the boom. In fact, her parents, Marianne and Odleif Skonnord, had hoped to hold out until the next day, when she might have been the first 1967 Centennial baby.

Unlike with older boomer women who blazed career trails out of the kitchen in the name of independence, Ms. Cuthbert's life might be defined as a quest for flexibility, a challenge she takes as a given.

Her lot has been less about making change than about navigating an already altered social landscape.

Today, Ms. Cuthbert has dropped six-year-old Graeme off at kindergarten, gone for a jog, showered and changed into a pink T-shirt and white cargos by the time a reporter knocks on the door of her pretty suburban home.

“Oh, you're early,” says the tanned blonde, her curly hair still half-wet.

That counts when your day is as orchestrated as Ms. Cuthbert's. She spends one day a week job-sharing as a primary-school teacher with the Surrey School District. The other four, she combines stay-at-home parenting with freelance work for an executive-relocation company. Currently, she's searching for docking space for a client's boat in Vancouver Harbour.

Ms. Cuthbert can't believe any stranger wants to know, for example, how her husband proposed. “I hate sappy,” she says. She prefers the story of how they met in a psychology class in university: He offered her a piece of gum — from the underside of the desk tablet.

She is also matter-of-fact when she talks about the kind of career false start that is particular to her end of the baby boom — which she would characterize as “Gen X,” despite demographer David Foot's claim that the second is a subset of the first.

Ms. Cuthbert started at Simon Fraser University when she was 17, but then, feeling lost, dropped out and did clerical work at a hospital for a couple of years. It got her back on track.

“I needed to focus on something. I like young kids, so teaching seemed to fit. Once you know what the job is you're going to do, you're not just getting a degree.”

Like many women her age, she delayed marriage and parenthood, lending a certain inevitability in Ms. Cuthbert's philosophy of life: She would marry after establishing a career, have kids later and patch together a work life to accommodate it all. “Today, it takes longer to get established and get married.”

She married at the age of 26 and had Andrea when she was 29 — her mother, also a teacher, had married her school-administrator dad when she was 19.

“When she had my sister, she had no intention of going back to work. . . . When I had Andrea, there was never a thought that I'd leave work. Although I've pulled back, I'm still in the work force.”

While she is imbued with the older boomers' enthusiasm for work and considers it a major part of her identity, she is like many women her age today who reject the idea of committing to one job for 30 years.

“We make it work. You can have continuity for the classroom and make it good for women to be able to make money and contribute to our households and not have to leave our children.”

A few minutes from Graeme's pickup time of 11:45, she pulls on sneakers and walks briskly through paved paths cut between the houses. Graeme — Gray, or “bug,” as she often calls him — saunters out the school's side door.

He's tall for a six-year-old, with sandy brown hair and clever eyes. He jumps up to give Mom a hug.

“What did you do today?”

“We let out the butterflies!” he squeals, fluttering his hands while still suspended in the air. The class had been raising “Painted Ladies” from cocoon to flight.

Later, while Graeme watches his allotted afternoon TV, Rescue Heroes at 1:30, Ms. Cuthbert gives up more of her work hours flipping through photo albums.

She turns the pages swiftly, not fully comfortable with the intrusion. There are a lot of baby pictures, many of them taken with her older sister Deborah, followed by pony rides, beach trips, bumper cars and — a rite of girlhood passage — the 1970 Ice Capades.

Television time over, Graeme asks for crafts. There is a rush of cutting and gluing and searching for googly eyes.

This is not the kind of existence Ms. Cuthbert thinks of when she thinks of the boomer generation. “I have aunts and uncles who are in their 50s. . . . They're the ones approaching retirement. I don't identify myself with anything they're going through.

“The baby boomers are the ones who, as they age, will put more pressure on the system. Government services won't be there for you and me. I'm not counting on it.”

But she's also not the stereotypical Gen Xer, blaming the boomers for everything they don't have. “Andrew and I have found our niche. We've been able to have good-paying jobs. We're managing. We have enough stuff. I don't sing the blues. Other people are fine with lots of debt. That's not me.”

With this, she looks out the window and says, “There she is!” as her daughter bombs down the path behind the house.

As everyone is fiddling with Lego, Ms. Cuthbert's handsome, dark-haired husband comes home and rounds up the troops for his afternoon jog. The kids will ride their bikes alongside him.

It's suggested to him that maybe the family has a supermom in their midst. “I'll just tuck in her cape,” he says with a wide smile, squeezing her shoulders before he jogs off.