Kathleen Desmarais

Lately, it has been getting harder and harder to juggle my time between family and business. Some days I am so scattered I don’t think I accomplish a thing. My time is so stretched between kids, business, and housekeeping that it seems like none of it gets done. And now our house is on the market so it has to be kept clean ALL THE TIME! Ugh! I think my kids are out to get me sometimes (paranoia is setting in). Every time I try to get on the computer the baby crawls onto my lab. She has even learned sabotage! She reaches up under my desk and hits the keys on my keyboard. (So if you ever see “#i&m?987nu” in one of my posts, you know how it happened.) The older kids sneak out of the house when they know my attention is on the computer and I find myself yelling a lot lately. “If I have to say ‘no’ to you more than once, it wastes my time. I only have time to say ‘no’ once!” I actually said that to my son the other day. I am not even sure what I meant by that.

It’s just that it’s hard for me to focus on more than one thing at a time. I can’t think and talk (or yell as the case may be) at the same time. When I sit down at the computer, I need to be able to stay there for at least an hour. Shoot, it takes me 15 minutes just to open programs and figure out where I left off. But it seems like these days my computer time comes in short spurts–5 mins. here, 15 mins. there. The start-stop of my day is the most frustrating part. I envy my husband. He works very hard all day long but he gets to experience the joy of task completion!

But when I take a deep breath and focus on priorities, I realize that the kids are my most important job. I really need to be there, at the table, when they doing there school work. I need to sit down with my baby on the floor and PLAY with her. It’s not enough to just be in the house with my kids and keep them safe. So lately I have been staying up to the wee hours of the morning to get work done and spending my days focused on the kids. At least that has been my goal each day. But the long hours wear on you and you walk around like a zombie from the sleep deprivation and do things like put dinner in the oven but forget to turn it on.

This is the challenge of home schooling when you have a home business. There is no time when you get to solely focus on one thing for any decent amount of time. You have to be willing and able to multi-task and deal with multiple interruptions. I am going to be examining this problem of juggling HS and HB more in depth. Many of the old strategies that use to work for me no longer seem to be helping. As working / home schooling moms we must be able to adapt to every new situation. For me it has been the addition of another child who has a particularity strong curiosity and little awareness of danger (and climbs like a monkey) and changes in our home situation (building a new house and selling the current one). Any seemingly small change can create havic and send you back to drawing board trying to figure it all out again.

I will be posting my journey through this temporary chaotic situation (and I am sure it is temporary), sharing any new strategies I employ. I welcome others to post how they handle (or struggle to handle) juggling HS and HB. Maybe we can learn from each other.