Here’s to all the parents who’ve been juggling like mad the past two weeks of Easter holiday! I see you…
… Spending the past month coordinating complex childcare arrangements on a colour-coded Excel spreadsheet…
… Project planning a full timetable of activities, entertainment and travel arrangements…
… Multitasking between Zoom meetings, sofa deep-dives for tiny lost Lego parts and fish finger prep…
… Temporarily moving your home office to the noisy, ketchup-splattered café of a Soft Play Centre…
… Somehow keeping clients, managers, colleagues, children, partners and babysitters happy, meeting their (sometimes conflicting) needs and demands.
My son’s in Reception so I’m new to this game and couldn’t have done the past fortnight without the tireless help of loving grandparents and a really flexible job. I also only have one child, and honestly don’t know how other parents manage to juggle multiple children and hefty workloads.
As your kids return to school and you go back to one-job-only existence (at least between 9am and 3pm!), consider…
How can you make this an “easy land” for yourself?
What might it look like to resist feeling like you’ve got to make up for time “lost” during the holidays?
If you’re feeling exhausted, can you give yourself permission to let others know, rather than feeling like you’ve got to hide it and “push on through”?
How would you like to acknowledge and reward yourself for everything you’ve done lately to juggle your various roles and make it work?
Honestly, hats off to you superstars with all the extra work you’ve been putting in over the past fortnight, most of it unacknowledged and unappreciated. If only we could put this stuff on our CVs, right??
Photo by Kevin Hessey on Unsplash