5 Quick Tips For Work-at-Home Parents
Dreaming of the day you can earn an income and still be at home with your kids? That's always been my goal too. Now that it's happening, I feel like I should share my
illogical thought processes
horrendous mistakes
serious fuck ups incredible insight with others. So I've taken a few minutes out of my busy writing/parenting/coffee swigging schedule to share the following.
1. You can have kids at home, or you can work from home, but not both at the same time with great success unless you:
a) have a really good lock on your office door
b) have chloroform and some rags on hand
c) invested in a velcro wall like I should have done years ago
d) are successful enough to have a nanny, in which case, most of us non-nanny-families are giving you the stink eye
2. As a working parent, you have to rethink your former sick day guidelines. Like, if you told your child he could stay home, and three hours later he's running around your office with the lights off, a tinfoil hat on his head, and pointing a Nerf gun at you as he screams, "KILL ALL THE THINGS!!!" as you're trying to write creatively, he is
not.
sick.
enough.
Not even close. Sigh.
3. The house will look like a Hoarders reunion show (minus the dead cats) until we catch up to the Jetsons and get robot maids. You could try and make your kids clean the house, but that would take both parenting and supervision. And who has that kind of time?
4. Nachos will become a gourmet meal, and that's okay. Well, until one of you has to have a valve replaced. But until then it's totally fine.
5. Feeling bad about being stretched so thin? Don't. You can learn to navigate the waters of a working parent with far less guilt than you thought possible, thanks to the help of 80's family classics. According to most films from my childhood, the following formula is true:
more money = happier family
Look at how happy Marty McFly was after he came back from changing the past and his parents were more financially successful? Okay, and maybe his mom had stopped drinking and the family bully became the friendly family lackey, but the clear message they're sending is that only struggling families have those problems. By that logic, my choices are either workaholism or alcoholism. And which one is going to pay for a trip to Fiji? Exactly.
I hope these tips helped you immensely. Now, if you're excuse me, my ever-so-sickly children have managed to hit each other a few times, spill cold coffee all over my desk, and smear fake blood on each other.
I love my life, I love my life, I love my life...
1. You can have kids at home, or you can work from home, but not both at the same time with great success unless you:
a) have a really good lock on your office door
b) have chloroform and some rags on hand
c) invested in a velcro wall like I should have done years ago
d) are successful enough to have a nanny, in which case, most of us non-nanny-families are giving you the stink eye
2. As a working parent, you have to rethink your former sick day guidelines. Like, if you told your child he could stay home, and three hours later he's running around your office with the lights off, a tinfoil hat on his head, and pointing a Nerf gun at you as he screams, "KILL ALL THE THINGS!!!" as you're trying to write creatively, he is
not.
sick.
enough.
Not even close. Sigh.
3. The house will look like a Hoarders reunion show (minus the dead cats) until we catch up to the Jetsons and get robot maids. You could try and make your kids clean the house, but that would take both parenting and supervision. And who has that kind of time?
4. Nachos will become a gourmet meal, and that's okay. Well, until one of you has to have a valve replaced. But until then it's totally fine.
5. Feeling bad about being stretched so thin? Don't. You can learn to navigate the waters of a working parent with far less guilt than you thought possible, thanks to the help of 80's family classics. According to most films from my childhood, the following formula is true:
more money = happier family
Look at how happy Marty McFly was after he came back from changing the past and his parents were more financially successful? Okay, and maybe his mom had stopped drinking and the family bully became the friendly family lackey, but the clear message they're sending is that only struggling families have those problems. By that logic, my choices are either workaholism or alcoholism. And which one is going to pay for a trip to Fiji? Exactly.
I hope these tips helped you immensely. Now, if you're excuse me, my ever-so-sickly children have managed to hit each other a few times, spill cold coffee all over my desk, and smear fake blood on each other.
I love my life, I love my life, I love my life...