Me and the wife are both working from home, while at the same time caring for both a hyper energetic 4 year-old and a 8-month baby.
Let's just say it's not been easy.
Back in December we had figured out we'd desperately need something like a week-long vacation with just the two of us (
i.e. away from constantly paying attention to diapers + feeding + sleep patterns + education + behavior + etc). We wanted to do this as soon as humanely possible for leaving the little one with the grandparents, and at the time we thought this opportunity would arise around April or May.
Guess who's not going on a childless vacation anytime soon, and has to spend 24/7 locked up in a house with their children.
We came to a family house in a very secluded beach town to reduce the probability of contagion (this is a ghost town all year around except Summer), and also for the older one to be able to leave the house and ride the bike for half an hour otherwise she'll overload our brains with constant loud attention-seeking tricks around the house. So I guess there's that.
Oh but we were talking about how we do the actual work. Right..
I'm doing project management right now so all I really need is
my company laptop and the internet. Of course being the overkill
moron enthusiast that I am, within the last 5 weeks I also ordered a
2nd-hand eGPU and a
cheap though pretty decent 22" monitor. I did justify the monitor as it being for productivity, but the eGPU is here so I can erm..
simulate stuff.
Serious question but how difficult is it to keep your kids from bothering you? We don't have any kids but the other day we were watching some program about how people had difficulties working from home because of kids etc. and we were like well this guy is sitting in the kitchen, the kids' bedroom, isn't telling Satan's spawn his kids to leave him alone etc. and we were like well why isn't he telling them to keep away? Looked like his kids were about the same age.
After some weeks of trying, we ended up with the morning / afternoon dynamic.
I try to do some light work in the morning (mostly answering e-mails, setting up meetings, etc.) while I take care of the girls during the morning and the wife does all her meetings and work that need more focus. In the afternoon we change roles.
Besides that, we have some rules come meal time, we both need to drop everything and do teamwork focus to cook, put the table, feed them (90% of the effort) and ourselves (10% of the effort), lift the table, put the stuff in the dishwasher, prepare them to nap/bed, baths, etc. There's absolutely no way we can leave these tasks to just one of us and not go mad.
And the time we spend in the kitchen.. oh how I wish for a damn restaurant right now..