Work-at-home summer prep
Consider this a PSA to all parents of elementary-aged children: We’re down to less than a month before the end of the school year.
Summers have always been hard for me as a self-employed person who works from home. September through June, I have a solid work routine and guaranteed time to focus.
July and August are pretty much a dumpster fire, professionally speaking.
Transitioning to summer has always been tough, but this year I’ll feel the pain more than ever. This has been the first time both of our children are in elementary school and I have been treasuring those precious weekday hours.
Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., I sequester myself in my basement office and my fingers are pretty much glued to my keyboard. Most days I’m so busy that I don’t eat lunch until I remember to choke something down in the five minutes before I leave to pick them up from the bus.
I have other self-employed friends who are semi-dreading the end of the school year, too. In theory, it would be nice to take July and August off from our work. We could spend buckets of quality time with our kids, sleep in, soak up the (limited) good weather and not jump every time our phone dings with a new email.
Of course, that’s not an option for most of us, since our businesses wouldn’t take kindly to a two-month hiatus. We are also fans of paying our mortgage and, like, eating …
So what’s the solution to keeping our children happy, fed and alive while we do the work we need to do? Camps! Lots of ’em!
This is the time of year when camps open the registration floodgates and parents start frantically writing cheques — hoping they don’t accidentally write the amount in the payee section because what millennial parent even writes cheques in 2018?!
Of course, camps aren’t cheap. There needs to be a balance between how much you’re going to earn that week and how much you’re paying to unload your kids for a sweaty week of themed day camp.
(Ooh — here’s an idea, camp owners. Registration really should take place the August before, when frustrated work-at-home parents would tearfully pay twice as much to have a quiet house the following summer.)
And so, I clicked around and read numerous fliers to compare costs. I scrutinized the calendar for July and August and decided which weeks would be toxic for my mental health (a.k.a. which weeks my husband would be working or sleeping off the night shift during all of our kids’ waking hours). I checked with friends to see which rugrats were going where.
I ended up signing the kids up for two weeks of full-day camp — one week in July, and one week in August to spread out my sanity. They’ll also attend a free week of half-day VBS (Vacation Bible School) at a nearby church, since they went last year and declared it to be the best camp they’d ever attended.
I have a good friend who babysits, and I can hire her to watch them — at her house — if I need the odd day or half-day here and there. The kids will spend time visiting my mom in Halifax, and there’s also the fact that their dad will have days off to take them to the playground, the Wildlife Park, etc.
Heading into this summer, I feel more prepared than I ever have in the past. By combining the powers of day camp, a babysitter, a doting grandmother, and a husband who does shift-work (and is therefore off certain weekdays), I hope I can make it through July and August with my career and my sanity intact.
***
You feel this pain on a spiritual level? Here are some related posts to scroll through while you sip a comforting hot beverage …
- Taking the pressure out of summer vacation (written going into last summer)
- The work-at-home summer (written going into the summer of 2016)
- Why we stopped signing up for summer sports
- How Google makes me a better work-at-home parent
- What you NEED to know about yourself if you work from home
- My tips for new freelance writers
- What our kids learned in “summer school”
Paint the damn dresser, already!
You’ve probably been thinking about it for a while, if you read my newspaper column from time to time. Maybe you’ve even gone so far as to look at colour options and even bought the paint. But still, you’ve hesitated.
Is painting a dresser going to be too much of a hassle? Is it going to look good in the end? Is it really going to be worth it?
Well, the wait is over. I’m about to give you five excellent reasons why you should put on your brave DIYer pants and paint the damn dresser this weekend …
1. It’s the weekend.
That means you have extra time for a little project. Plus, what is a weekend without a project, even? (Although I am a person who does projects just about every day of my life so maybe you can’t trust me on this.)
2. It’s been on your mind for a while.
Come on, I bet you have a dresser somewhere in your house that you’ve been thinking of painting. Maybe it’s because it’s old, or you got it as a hand-me-down and never liked it. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t match the decor. Maybe it’s because you love my columns (awww, thanks) and you’re kind of tempted to put one of them into action …
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
Kids and junk food
I admit it — my husband and I are junk food junkies. We have been long before we got together in Grade 11, and our earliest dates centered around McDonald’s. (This was back in the “good old days” when a $5 bill covered one person’s meal, and $10 was enough for two.)
It was easier when our kids were babies and toddlers. You can mow down a six-pack of “road nugs” while your kid is in a rear-facing car seat, eat a plate of nachos while they’re napping and eat bacon freely while it’s still considered a choking hazard.
Once your kids wise up to the wonders of junk food, it isn’t so easy. But while my husband and I don’t have the greatest eating habits, we think — or at least, we hope — we’ve sheltered our six-year-old and seven-year-old from this “dark side” of our personalities.
Yes, we eat too many chips, but we only ever eat them after the kids are in bed asleep. Our son actively dislikes chips, in fact, except for a single brand of plain chips he deems acceptable. (For one of my children to hate potato chips is kind of unthinkable, and yet …)
“… Technology is keeping kids on their butts more, and as a result, those butts are getting … fuller. I see the bellies sagging below T-shirt hems. I bet you see them, too …”
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
White teeth without a filter
*** The following post is sponsored conversation with Alliance Dental and the Alliance Dental Partner Program. As always, all opinions and vehicle selfies are my own. ***
You know those whitening toothpaste commercials where they show the range of colours teeth can be? I always imagined I’d be in the mid-range — not really dark, but certainly nowhere near the bright white. I was in the “beige zone” — otherwise known as That Blah Yellow Tinge.
My teeth were certainly STRAIGHT, thanks to two years of braces — and the fact that I still wear my retainers nightly, 20 freakin’ years after getting my braces off. And while I was certainly happy they were straight, the colour did bug me.*
(*Especially next to my neighbour — who seriously has the most gorgeous naturally white teeth you’ve ever seen in your life. Whenever I stood next to her, I felt like I had a mouthful of yellow Chicklets. But EVERYONE feels that way next to her.)
I mean, they weren’t terrible. But they also weren’t that white. I was so self-conscious about the yellow-ness of my teeth that I got very comfortable with the “teeth whiten” feature on PicMonkey.
Protecting your child from sexual abuse
We thought we had done everything right.
We’d read and re-read The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers, including the section about how “your body is your own personal property, and nobody else’s business — especially the private parts.”
We’d talked about public bathrooms and change rooms. We’d told the kids that, yes, sometimes there are kidnappers who will try to steal children. We’d talked about how sometimes there are “creepy adults” who try to touch children’s private parts. We’d taught them to scream, “Help! Stranger!”
We talked. We quizzed. We role-played.
We thought we had done everything we could. But recently, our family learned that it’s never enough.
When I was a child, my mom had a blue paperback called Sometimes it’s O.K. to Tell Secrets. It was a collection of little stories and cartoons about kids finding themselves in sketchy situations and having the courage to (A) get themselves out of it and (B) tell a responsible adult what happened.
Even though it sounds a little disturbing, my sister and I loved this book. Our mom would read these stories about a child being touched inappropriately, or forced to look at dirty pictures, or coerced into doing something bad and being told not to tell their parents.
I don’t know what happened to our tattered blue book — full of stories of children in bad situations — but the other day I ordered a new copy while wiping tears from my eyes. Sexual abuse hit our family out of nowhere …
We learned that the “bad person” you warned your kids about isn’t always the stereotype of the isolated neighbour, the uncle that makes you feel uncomfortable or the leering stranger that gives you the creeps.
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, The Mom Scene …
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