When you meet Raquel Rutledge, you get the impression that her life is much like other women her age. Rutledge, 42, is a wife and a mother. She takes her six-year-old and nine-year-old sons to school and, when time permits, goes for a morning run. She loves to cook and to be with her husband John. She makes sure the family dog gets some exercise, runs errands, does the laundry and goes to her kids’ school functions. She also works part-time as a journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

But what sets Rutledge apart from the other mothers at her boys’ baseball games is that she is a 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner.

Although the Pulitzer jurors recognized the outstanding merit in the category of local reporting for the series “Cashing in on Kids,” Rutledge was surprised by the honor. “This doesn’t seem real. To this day I wonder what God has planned with all of this.”

Admittedly, Rutledge loves what she does. “I never think about what or if there will be any award attached to it. I’ve never been one to attached markers to achieve in my life. That’s just not how I see my career.”

Growing up in Shorewood, Rutledge’s career took various turns before finding its groove. After earning a mass communications degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Rutledge and a friend decided to experience Japan, where she taught English for more than a year.

After returning to the United States, Rutledge took a job in radio doing on-air news and selling advertising for a Hartford station. From there, she did research, wrote and anchored the local edition of CNN’s Headline News in Kenosha.

Rutledge switched to print media when she joined the staff at the Waukesha Freeman. “I was there less than a year when I got an opportunity at The Colorado Springs Gazette,” she says, where she covered city hall, the military and education.

During her seven years in Colorado, Rutledge became a wife and mother. She and John, also an award-winning journalist from the Milwaukee area, decided to return home to be near family.

In 2004, she joined the newsroom at the Journal Sentinel. “With my sons being so small, I only wanted to work two days a week,” she recalls – a work schedule that wasn’t necessarily available to newsroom staff. But Gerry Hinkley, the late-deputy managing editor of the newspaper, took a chance – a chance that paid off for both Rutledge and the Journal Sentinel.

Starting as a general assignment reporter, Rutledge moved to the Public Investigative Consumer Fraud Team.

In 2008, the newsroom got a late-night call from a reader outraged by the newspaper’s report of a baby left to die in a daycare van in the summer heat. The caller’s message was that the baby should not have been at the daycare in the first place. Rutledge called the tipster back the next morning and thus began an odyssey that brought her to Columbia University to receive one of journalism’s most prestigious awards.

The series, “Cashing in on Kids,” focused on the state-supported child-care program, Wisconsin Shares, exposing day care operators with criminal records and ties to drugs, prostitution and fraud costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Like the perfect storm, a lot of factors came together, Rutledge says. “It was about the abuse of the system and the safety of children.”

Rutledge began months of research, sifting through and comparing databases and staking out daycare locations. “Strong connections began to emerge between criminals in the system and some daycare centers.” Four months of research and hard shoe-leather journalism was done before the newspaper published her first story in the ongoing series that is now made up of more than 50 stories.

“Once the story ran, I had a tremendous response from readers. I had never gotten that kind of response before. They were outraged,” she recalls.

Due to the weight of the series, Rutledge increased her work schedule to three days a week. “My editors did a great job keeping me focused – there were so many different directions I could have gone. They cut me loose to pursue this story,” she says. The Journal Sentinel editor, Marty Kaiser, and managing editor, George Stanley, have created a newsroom culture that allows journalists to do their best work, Rutledge says. “They’ve allowed me to work part-time – on days and during the hours that suit me and are conducive to my family, which made the series possible.”

“Raquel is a leader in the newsroom through her exceptional reporting and writing,” Kaiser says. “She is a determined reporter who works as hard as any reporter I have ever seen to get the story and tell it with truth and accuracy.”

It can be difficult to keep momentum going when you’re not in the newsroom day to day, she admits. However, it also kept her refreshed and helped to avoid burn out. “It’s tough to wade through all that research and data day after day.

“Fortunately, the nature of the job allows for flexibility. I can be at my sons’ school functions and games and take them to school. And we have tons of family here. My mom and stepfather and my father-in-law love being with our kids, which helps a lot,” Rutledge says.

But like most working women who have families, she struggles with priorities. “I am constantly balancing my energy channeled into each of these roles, weighing the demands and needs of each and trying desperately to respond accordingly. It’s hard to know how I’m really doing. I guess I’ll find out down the road.”

In May, Rutledge attended the Pulitzer awards luncheon at Columbia University in New York City where she and the other Pulitzer winners received a diploma-like certificate and an engraved crystal paperweight from Tiffany & Co. (Each winner also received $10,000). At her table, she sat with John, editors from the Journal Sentinel paper and members of the Pulitzer family.

All pretty heady stuff, Rutledge admits, but family is the grounding factor in her life. Her sons have taught her the importance of slowing down and living in the moment, she says, “among a billion other things that I’m not even aware of yet.”

One night when she was putting her sons to bed, her oldest asked, “Mom, do you think they know who you are in China?”

He was trying to get his arms around how big this is, Rutledge says. But really for her two little boys, all these awards mean is time away from them. “We’ve traveled to receive awards and then there are speaking appearances at colleges and rotary clubs. It takes time away from them and away from the work.”

The series also has earned Rutledge the 2010 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, Long Island University’s George Polk Award and The Neiman Foundation’s Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.

Yes, it has been quite a year for Raquel Rutledge – and it’s only half over. So what’s next? “More stories,” she says. “I continue to get good solid tips and I’m excited to track them down and see what unfolds.”