Managing work and kids...

[akmom]

Well I put in for my first job in 6 years (I have been a stay-at-mom almost exclusively since my first was born). It's not the first one I've applied for over the years, but it's the first serious offer I've gotten.

I meet with the supervisor next week to discuss the details and either accept or decline the job. At this point, there are still unknown terms that will have to be met to my satisfaction next week or I won't take the job. But I'm excited about it.

My husband still thinks there should be a stay-at-home parent while the children are young, and I do agree in theory. We always kind of agreed that whomever could earn the most would be the one working. But I asked him to keep his job at least for awhile, even if I take this one, just to make sure everything works out. And he agreed with that. In the meantime (or longer), I was hoping for tips on how families manage having both parents work.

I've obviously figured out the logistics of childcare and transportation, but I'm not sure how people pull off making dinner, doing the housework and spending time with the kids without keeping them up late into the night. I typically do these things during the day and it's rather crammed. It takes me at least 2 hours a day to do meals. And we already find ourselves letting the kids stay up for an hour past their bedtime (more on weekends) because we've got stuff to do with them that takes longer than we expected. It's been getting pretty disorganized over the years... I had a good routine going a few years ago when it was a key factor in managing kids' behavior, but now that that's pretty much established (and without much in the way of external demands), I've kind of let it go. Things like playing with a fussy baby at midnight probably won't work if I can't take a nap with her the following day...

 

[bssage]

Well

We tend to have fast food several times a week which I don't advise. When were on our game we will cook extra meats on the weekends for quick preparation during the week.

Some tasks cant accumulate until the weekend or they just get to big and end up consuming the lions share of the weekend. For those maintenance tasks we have found that early in the morning before the house proper is awake is the best time.

My arrival goes something like this

Kisses and I miss you right after I walk in the door.

Then I change use the bathroom get a snack or drink ect

One on one with Chloe. half to an hour

One on one with Cole. Half to an hour.

Chores that need attention ASAP. Or dinner if I am cooking

Family time

showers homework ect.

Tuck in time Half hour each min.

Me time and retuck's

Surprisingly I do kind of stick to this schedule. I give time to the youngest first. And occasionally have to remind Cole his time is coming. Not very often though.

I think the big item is preping meals. especially if one of you does not cook much or not very good at it. Buy easy prep stuff for those anticipated nights.

Early morning once you get the hang of it really give you the most bang for your buck time wise IMHO. I can get alot done very quickly with no distractions.

I don't know the perfect system. This is just mine. And its not written in stone. But I am pretty consistent with it.

 

[mom2many]

I have no clue. I've always envied how working parents manage to do it all. I'm home all day and still find myself behind. Good luck though!

 

[cybele]

I should add that I only work part-time (3.5 days per week set + commission based work on weekends).

In our house, everyone pitches in with housework, regardless of age, there is something everyone can do. The type of mentality of "We all live here, therefore we all maintain it" it gets done, our house is not spotless 100% of the time, but it's clean.

Everyone pitches in with cooking too, that's something we can do as we have 4 adults and 2 older children in the house, but even before that, it was always a shared duty between my husband and I. We have a slow cooker which is wonderful, we tend to prepare foods beforehand, say, on a sunday night I do usually cook a second dinner that can be put in the fridge and baked when I get home, such as a lasagne, pasta bake, quiche or such. We also tend to fall into a lot of "quick meals" stir fries, salads, soups, pastas, anything that can go from kitchen to table in less than 20 minutes is a winner.

Spending time with the kids can happen anywhere really, we make sure that we all sit around the table at the same time at dinner and talk during dinner, I probably fail at the whole one on one time thing, but I think that has more to do with number of children rather than my job, we do what we can, in the end, put 8 people in a small house and you all end up spending more time with each other than you want anyway, haha.

I am also an earlybird, which helps, it's 6:30am on a day that I work and I am up, I have a load of washing in the machine, the dishwasher is going and I am just sitting down with a coffee before I get the kids up to get ready for school. I find that for me, mornings are usually the best times to get things done.

 

[stjohnjulie]

If I have learned anything in the last two years I have learned that when you have a family you tend to make it work no matter what. Right now I have a crazy schedule, one that I never thought any rational person would attempt or be able to do. But guess what, it's not that bad once I had a couple of weeks of it under my belt. And even when I think "ok, I can't take anything else" I always seem to manage what ever comes my way.

My week goes like this...
Monday: Up at 4am, out of the house at 4:45am. Work until 6 or 6:15am. Home, feed the kids, get them ready, out of the house by 7:15am and back to work. Take the little one to daycare at 8:30am. Open my retail store by 10am. Homeschool and wait on customers until my husband picks up the kids at 3:30pm. I work until 9pm. So the hubby handles the kids in the afternoon/evening

Tuesday-Friday: Up at 4am, and repeat above. I get done with work around 2pm. So I get the kids, grocery shop, whatever else needs to be done, and make dinner, chill with the family, and go to bed around 7:30 at the same time the little guy goes down.

Saturday- I still get up around 4:30, go to work around 6:30, home around 2pm. But I don't have to homeschool, or work in the store. It's my 'office' day for data entry, counting beans, shuffling paper, and doing anything I need to get done that can't be done throughout the week.

Sunday- Off day. I have to do all the housework that didn't get done all week long. We go to the laundry on Sunday and do it all in one shot (2.5 hours usually) And hopefully we can do something fun with the kids.

Most of the week I feel like I am just working and cooking and not a lot of time for other stuff. I take the time with my kids in little moments here and there. Sometimes I cook double one night, or a couple of nights, and then we just have heated leftovers. That gives me a couple of extra hours on 'leftover' day.

I gotta go! It's my LONG day!!! Don't worry, you will make do, no matter how hard it might sound

 

[singledad]

I'm a single parent, so it's kinda the same thing...

For me, I find that sticking to a schedule, especially in the mornings, is key. Fortunately I also don't need a lot of sleep, so I can get up early to get stuff done before my DD has to wake up.

My day is like this:
Get up at 4:30 AM. 4:30 -6:00 AM is my time for exercising and getting myself ready for the day.

6:00AM my DD gets up - then its breakfast and helping her get ready. It's a lot better now that she can dress herself but I still have to help her with her hair etc.

Leave home at 6:40, I drop her off at school 7:00AM sharp. Thanks to Africa's first high-speed train, I'm usually at the office just after 7:30. I leave work at around 4:00 PM, pick her up from school, and we usually get home around 5:00 PM. Then it's play-time. We spend 30 min to an hour doing what she wants to do, together.

I don't spend a lot of time on dinner. If I don't have something that I pre-prepared and froze, it's something quick like Pasta or stir-fry.

After dinner she has to go take her bath and get into her pajamas and then it's story-time, (usually around 7:30) which means a continuation of spending time together, but with a lot less excitement than before.

When she is asleep, I do the dishes, clean up, and spend some time doing other things. That's when I stop being dad and get to just be me. Considering that I don't need to go to bed until around 11:00 PM, it's enough time.

What helps immensely is the fact that I have a lady who comes in twice a week to do the cleaning and ironing. So I just have to take care of getting the laundry washed (which doesn't really take time) and things like doing dishes and wiping down surfaces after dinner. Before I got her, I used to spend my evenings cleaning and ironing and that does become a bit much after a while.

Weekends - you will rarely see me on here over weekends. Especially on Sundays, I try to spend as much time as possible with my DD. On Saturdays there are unfortunately a lot of other things that need to get done around the house and in the garden, as well as things like shopping and preparing food to be frozen, etc.

Oh my. I just read through what I wrote and I sound so freaking domesticated, it's not even funny. I might have to hand in my man-card soon

 

[cybele]

SingleDad feels the need to hand in his man-card, while women around the world are swooning at the thought of such a domesticated man.

 

[mom2many]

No reason to hand in that man card, you have raised the ante for many, many, men out there.

 

[akmom]

Wow, you guys are all early-birds! I get up at 7 a.m. and that won't need to change with this job. I tend to stay up late rather than get up early to finish jobs around the house. I'm not very structured with my time, so that's kind of the only way I can ensure I have time to get things done. If it ends up taking an hour longer, then you just stay up an hour longer... but if it ends up taking longer than you expected in the morning, it just won't get done, because you have to go! Right?

Also, I don't have to worry as much about waking up the kids. By bedtime they are tired, and if they do wake up, I can expect them to go back to sleep. It seems like if I so much as sneeze in the morning, the kids wake up. Then they want to come downstairs and stand on my feet while I make breakfast, and I can't really expect them to go back to bed for an hour or less.

What kinds of meals do you guys make during the week? We tend to plan our "special meals" on weekends, but even during the week, dinner takes a lot of time to make. I have tried making bulk meals to freeze, but it seems like we just run out of freezer space.

We eat pasta and stir fry sometimes, but it isn't quick. It takes forever to cut up the vegetables and make the sauce for stir-fry. And maybe I just don't have any quick pasta recipes... all mine take 1/2 to prepare (if I'm not interrupted) and about an hour to bake. I do require all meals to contain a protein, a vegetable and a carbohydrate (tubers or whole grains). I sometimes get the frozen prepared meals at the store, but I find they are too salty and skimpy on vegetables to suffice for meals on a regular basis.

I don't know... I just feel like dinner takes so long to make. I survived off Ramen noodles for years, but with a family, you can't really do that...

 

[cybele]

With stir fries, sometimes I will chop up the veggies in the morning, and put them in a bowl in the fridge, then I only have to tip the bowl into the wok when I get home, otherwise, I go for veggies that don't need to be chopped, bean shoots, snow peas, peas, corn, small button mushrooms, spring onions (usually with a pair of scissors). If I'm in a rush I don't worry with a thick sauce, a bit of soy sauce, lemongrass, garlic and lime juice works wonders, especially if you are using an infused oil like chilli or garlic.

Pasta doesn't need to be baked, a fresh pasta in a pot of boiling water will take no longer than 5mins, dried pasta no more than 10-15mins. To cut the boiling time in half, boil the water in a kettle before putting it in the pot.

For sauces, anything you can do in a frypan works. Our family is vegetarian, so all of our protein is from non-meat sources, however I imagine something like some some diced chicken with a jar of crushed tomatoes, grated (as grating is faster than chopping and cooks faster) carrot and zucchini and some olives would work well. Shellfish cooks very fast, so you could use the same vegetable base only with prawns, scallops, mussels and so on.

A few other quick things we make:

Egg rolls, which is really just stir fries veggies wrapped in a thin omelette.

Savoury crepes, similar to the egg rolls but wrapped in a pancake, only I tend to go a little different with the veggies in these just out of preference.

Cannellini bean salad with the beans, cucumber, tomatoes, baby spinach and parsley, served with crusty bread. (The recipe I got this from, if I recall correctly, was a tuna and canellini bean salad)

"Kitchen sink omelette" which is basically an omelette with everything in the fridge in it (ie: everything but the kitchen sink)

Udon soup (we use tofu, but chicken would also work) stock, spring onions, bean shoots, enoki mushrooms, miso paste, udon noodle.

Laksa (again with the tofu, a non-veg laksa typically uses prawns or fish) rice vermicelli, laksa paste, ginger, lime juice, stock, coconut milk, bok choy, chilli (optional).

Frittata with salad, if you make the frittata quite thin and cook it in a frypan (similar to an omelette, but with the milk to puff it out) it only takes about 5 minutes in the pan.

 

[cybele]

Oh also, my favourite recipe website has a "quick and easy" section:

30 minute or less meals:
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/collections/30+minute+meals/1[/url]

15 minute or less meals:
http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/collections/15+minute+meals/1[/url]

 

[bssage]

My menu is not nearly as dynamic as Cybele's. Lets say for example we are making burgers dogs or steaks on the grill Sunday night. We kinda just double the order. All those things will be fine in the fridge during the week.

If we are making Chili, taco's, or something like that. We double or triple the amount of ground we brown. For quick prep of those for anything that calls for hamburger during the week. Same goes for sausage or bacon.

Just simple things like that.

The mornings I think at least for me. I am just much more expeditiously. Its not uncommon for me to get things done in half the time it would take to do the same task during the day or evening. Not only are the kids still down. There is nothing begging for my time on the TV, outside ect. The kids and even the wife like to sleep in. And it may be just me. But I prefer not to have any help. I don't want the anyone around. I'm like a ball of fire when left alone.

 

[akmom]

Pretty much all those "15-minute" recipes look good. I could really go for that almond and pistacchio couscous!

I'm not familiar with all the ingredients you use in your food, Cybele, but I'm sure some of can be substituted. Our produce options are pretty limited here. I just use mushrooms, onions, bell peppers, shredded carrots and kale in my stir-fries and curries. I use standard frozen mixed vegetables for the rest of our meals. For protein, we have mostly fish (we fish a lot), and I do buy chicken and sometimes shellfish. We don't really eat hamburger or any red meats really. The carb is either brown rice, mashed potatoes, turnips or rutabagas, or a whole grain pasta or bread. I guess what really takes time is the thawing and cooking of meat, and then making the sauces. I can't start dinner until I pick up my daughter from school, because I need to be there when things cook, and we don't get home until 4:30 most days.

Oh, and I LOVE lemongrass, but can only get the canned paste locally, usually with other flavors. I dissolve it in canned coconut milk to make a curry sauce, which we pour over steamed vegetables and fish, on brown rice. That used to be one of our favorite meals, but for some reason our grocer only stocks the super spicy curry pastes now... which the kids hate. I'm gonna have to see if I can replicate some of the sauces using lemongrass powder. (Which will probably take a long time.)

 

[cybele]

I'm sure it would be easy to sub some of the ingeedients, sorry, I keep forgetting the cultural differences, I guess that because Australia is so close to Asia, Asian ingredients would be much more commonplace here than in America.

If I want to make chilli or tacos, however, I usually have to go for a bit of adive into the suburbs to find all the ingredients though. Not something the local general store or farmers market stocks. Bssage, your menu sounds dynamic to me, Mexican food is pretty exotic here, haha.

 

[bssage]

There are lots of things I prefer reheated. Homemade chicken and noodles, Chili. Lots of stuff gets better with a little age. Kinda like me

 

[akmom]

Chili indeed gets better with age. The flavors diffuse into the broth. Problem is getting chili to last more than a day before everyone eats it all!

 

[singledad]

I've thought of another thing - slow cooker.

Curries, Stews, whatever - you just chuck all the ingredients in the pot in the morning, set the timer, and your meal is waiting for you when you get home

 

[CeenRodriguez]

It takes a huge adjustment in the family if both parents are working. if this is what you decided about, then you must consider having a house maid perhaps? But you need to consider good recommendations regarding about this. Make sure that you choose and find a good one. Your kids might be affected with this big adjustment, so as parents, you need to make them understand of the whole thing as well. And even if you're working, do not forget to give them quality time so they won't feel neglected.

 

[jollysmith123]

I think you both can staggered your work schedules - for instance, if your husband works daytime hours and is home after school and in the evening, you can take a shift of 4:00 p.m. to midnight. Dad may then be in charge of preparing dinner, cleaning up the kitchen and helping the children with their homework.

 

[Catherine O.]

Managing work while taking care of your family is truly a challenging job. I salute you guys for balancing that all with ease (with sweat and love I'm sure! )...

I too am struggling right now. I've just started to get a hang with all the job offers pouring in and somehow, all I made is the daily schedule for my school-age kids.

In the morning, I wake up at 6AM to do the laundry ( I do this every other day). By the time the kids wake up at around 8AM or 9AM, we start with breakfast, followed by brushing their teeth, taking a bath, their daily dose of multivitamins and off to the learning center. When we get back in the house and have our lunch, I tuck them in for their afternoon naps. This is usually my "me time" where I get to do some catching up with my friends through social networks or update the family's financials.

With this daily routine, I had difficulty inserting my work. And so I asked my mom's assistance while I prepped myself for job requirements and interviews. I made a list of the kids' daily activities and checked on them as often as I could.

Somehow right now I am able to manage. Although, I am targeting the way cybele is running their household. It is an inspiration!

Right now, the kids' activities are mostly in the house since they are not starting their formal schooling yet; but this coming June, we will be enrolling the eldest in kindergarten and we are looking through school orientations. This will be another exciting chapter in the family!