Pandemic journal

Day 336

Ugh … after one week of work with the kids at home I’m wondering—how again did we do this for three months last year? My spouse and I split up the week into half day blocks of minding the children. Working part time and having the nanny over twice, there were only 2 days on which I had to combine work with looking after them. I didn’t feel particularly stressed, but there was a lot of work to do, with time pressure. I had several meetings with a child on my lap, because I had no control over when the meetings were scheduled and one of the children had a sudden need for extra attention.

Last year the children needed constant attention—no chance of getting any work done with them around. Then it was clear: there’s just no way I can squeeze in a proper work week into my time available. Now they’re older, we can let them play for a bit while working. But rarely did I get more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted work. I got mad at them at least once a day.

But it wasn’t all bad. Because of the proper layer of snow, they happily played outside. And getting up early, I managed to go cross-country skiing in the park 4 times this weeks so far! The covid cases are going down, so the city announced that restrictions will be loosened. Just like all the times before though, such initial announcements were too vague to know what they meant for the daycare of our children.