with Britt Reints
Forget the 9 to 5; Full Time, All the Time is a blog about the mobile working life - when you have the freedom to work from anywhere and the responsibility of always having your smartphone turned on. Britt Reints works as a freelance writer while traveling fulltime in an RV with her husband and two kids. She explores balancing real-life bills with an unconventional work life, and finding time to maintain relationships with family and friends.
You can also find Britt at InPursuitOfHappiness.net.
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My son’s preschool has been shut down for the last two days for Teacher In-Service. The new “school year” begins after Labor Day and the teachers use this time to prepare their classrooms for the switch. I know that I am lucky that my son goes to a year round school that is open most of the year. With the standard holidays, four inservice days a year (two in the Fall and two in the Spring), and a week off between Christmas and New Year’s, I know that I am lucky. I rarely have to find alternative arrangements.
Still every year, the inservice days creep up on me and I find myself desperately making alternate arrangements. Okay, maybe not desperate. But this heat and forgetting to mark the days in my calendar is making me just a teeny bit crabby about the situation. When I was complaining to a neighbor with school age kids that I was struggling to stay on task while working from home and having a four year old that was ready to break out of the house, she quickly told me to get used to it. She pulled out the school calendar and showed me that in our local school district there is an inservice day at least once every month. Throw in Christmas Break, Ski week and Easter break and a whole slew of other days - and we are talking almost 45 days off during the school year.
I practically had a panic attack about all those days off and my kid won’t be starting Kindergarten for another year.
I know that I am one of the lucky ones with a incredibly flexible work schedule. It probably won’t be a problem for me to work from home those days. My spouse works in Finance and with a fairly traditionalist boss who wants her employees in the office everyday from at least 9am to 5pm. So I know that the In-Service days will often fall to my responsibility.
And I’m not sure I can survive.
Working Mommas with school-age kids, please tell me how you do it?
When I have to work from home with the little kids at home, I set up a workstation for them next to mine. It keeps them occupied some of the time and, if they’re not occupied well, it still makes them feel important, with “work” to do.
The big kids are big — 14, 12, and 10 — so they’re easier in some ways. The baby (nearly 22 months) is the toughest. 3 1/2 year old is really good about it, oddly enough…
Lylah | August 29th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Oh my - this topic is high on our list too.
There’s more than service days, and staff learning days.
My daughter just started Kindergarten in one of the esteemed Cupertino alternative schools, the ones that need a lottery draw, and have near perfect API scores.
There we were all thrilled that she got her name drawn in Feb. The euphoria died soon, to learn that they had no CDC space, and the wait list ran more than 2 years, with no plan to expand.
Okay so I decided to take a financial hit (fortunate to be able to afford it) and switched to part time to accommodate the school hours, staff learning days, several mid year breaks etc.
But the best was yet to come -I happened to see a small bullet on the class newsletter that Sep10-18 is parent conference days - great, we get to talk to our daughter’s teacher yippee!! But oh - oh in small print there were these words “early dismissal”! huh - yes the school lets out all children half day for the whole time they have parent teacher conferences too, and oh by the way this is not published anywhere. So here I am trying to figure out how to handle this and future last minute surprise informations from the school about short days, and holidays.
So my work of advice be prepared, elementary school is harder on the parents, my daughter on the other hand is having a blast.
Sunnyvale_mom | August 30th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
My kids are 6 and 10 so I’m used to the school schedule conflicts/days off/sickness whatever.
The best thing to do is make friends with your kid’s friend’s parents, especially other working Moms (or even SAHMs). You can trade off kids on days off from school. On the days that I take off, we have at least two extra kids…and I often give my kids to their friends parents for the day if I can’t take off.
My kids would rather spend the day with their friends than spend all day with “just me” anyway.
What I’ve found is that even SAHMs don’t look forward to those days off from school. It’s a break in their routine as well…so they are usually open to taking my kids for at least part of the day.
Karla E. | August 30th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
This year I’ve got dad home for those days, but we had this last year. Iif your son is in after school care, at least some of them, then they are usually open for those days. I’d check on that, though, Mt. View seems to have a lot of options, but some other cities they seem to fill up fast. And lots of parents do the trade-off, I just need a car that holds three kids to do that.
Nicole/wksocmom | September 12th, 2008 at 2:02 am