I look forward to and thoroughly enjoy the school summer holidays, especially having my two little men at home for the most-part. It does offer up a unique set of challenges however.
CHILDCARE
Childcare-wise both enjoy a few days a week at a local holiday scheme which runs out of a building on the school site. We’ve used it for five years now for the eldest and the youngest who starts school in September has been enjoying it for the first time. This provides me with guilt-free intensive work time while they enjoy a wide range of indoor and outdoor activities.
THE HOME JUGGLE
This is the easy bit, I get the boys do all of the work. No really, I do a bit every day, the kids help out and Roy does more than his fair share however while the house is clean I won’t say it is always 100% tidy during the hols. This doesn’t bother me. The boys come first, work comes second and housework as and when.
WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
This week, despite my being uber-organised, the boys being safely and happily in childcare and my to do list being neatly scheduled a spanner fell into the works, clattered about and spat the Blue Screen of Death at me. Yes really. Little things like your PC looking like this will somewhat affect your productivity.
Thanks to my backing up everything and often working via the cloud (Onedrive is my friend) I lost nothing other than the time it took for me to work out what the problem was and run system restore. It does pay to have a Plan B ready in the case of potential disasters like this though!
IS IT WORTH THE EFFORT?
It IS a juggle but you know what? I wouldn’t change it for the world. When it comes to flexibility working for myself makes a huge difference to us all. While I am chained to my desk most days during the holidays at 4am while the boys sleep I am able to take spontaneous breaks and run to the park or go walking when the weather is in our favour, to build dens after lunch because I want to and to enjoy spending time with these fabulous little boys (who are growing so quickly!).
Over the last couple of years especially I’ve pretty much perfected the art of making double strength coffee and enduring earlier than early starts so that I may work effectively and be mum. I put this down to having adopted the attitude that nothing will go as scheduled and that I should simply work around that.
Juggling work and the school holidays can work and does for us. So far I have a happy bunch of clients, happy and carefree kids and if you ignore the odd grey hair peeking through a contented work and home me.
