My husband and I are both work-from-home professional writers. The advantages are great, being that we’re parents to some super-fabulous and wildly energetic miniature Coopers. We save wads of dough on transportation and childcare and we never have miss a school field trip or story time at the local library.
There are a couple drawbacks. The biggest is self-discipline. To make it work, we have to be on top of a large number of projects at once and when the kids are awake, we have to switch back and forth between who’s on parenting duty and whose tethered to the desk.
Once we figured out how to juggle and balance our business and family lives, we met a new challenge. We NEVER stop working. One of us is always plunking away at the keyboard, day and night and while we make a point of having meals together, we sometimes forget to do simple things like sit down as a family and watch a movie or play a rousing game of Candy Land.
For these things, we’ve learned to block out times on our calendars and schedule some spontaneous family fun. Yeah, I said it, and I meant it, too. We don’t plan what activity we’ll be doing ahead of time, but we both know on Tuesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. our family will be doing something together. Work will wait– our children’s youth won’t.
So now that we’ve figured out the little stuff, we have to get a handle on total days off. There’s a common misconception that working from home is a carefree lifestyle with few obligations and a widely flexible schedule. For writers with daily deadlines, as we have, days off have to be scheduled just like any other job. If we’re planning to take Wednesday off to be with our children, we have to get all of our Wednesday writing done by Tuesday.
We haven’t had a vacation day since the hubz started working from home, so we figured it was time to try. My oldest starts school tomorrow, and we deserved to have a family day. We got most of our work done ahead of time (we had to finish a little in the morning) and then the family vacation day began. And it was glorious.
We busted out the Slip ‘N Slide, which by the way, isn’t meant for out-of-shape kids over 30…that’s gonna hurt for a week. We walked to the park and had a blast on the swings. Then we came home and the boys played Wii with their dad while I made dinner, with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
After dinner, the littles enjoyed bubble baths followed by a full-on movie night, complete with popcorn and lemonade. By nine o’clock we had three sleeping stooges and a bottle of wine and some candlelight waiting.
Our first vacation day was a wonderful experience and everyone had a great time. It was definitely incentive to keep up the trend and schedule more days off in the future…after I heal from the Slip ‘N Slide-oak tree incident.
Image Source: flickr.com/photos/edenpictures/2540432156
About jessi
