Skip to main content

Repeated illness from daycare -- the never-ending cycle

Here is how it plays out during the cold season when you're a working parent. The following sequence of events is repeated over and over and over again until all viruses have cycled through your household. 

First, kid gets sick. Kid stays home from daycare. You stay home from work to take care of sick kid. You fall behind in work.

Kid gets better. Now you've caught the kid's illness and you're sick. You stay home from work, falling behind even more. You still have to take care of kid while being sick. Consequently, you may not rest and recover adequately. When you finally return to work you are too tired to work as efficiently as you need to catch up. 

By the time you think you have stabilized your workload and you are no longer feeling physically or emotionally destroyed, guess what? Kid gets sick again and the cycle repeats.

The last two cold seasons have been especially brutal. Parents, I seriously don't know how we're doing this. To make things worse, I feel like our struggles are invisible to the rest of the world.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How time management for parents can improve daily life

It has been a while since I've posted. No free time! From wake-up to lights out, it's go-go-go all week. How am I even writing this right now? What essential task am I ignoring? How am I going to pay for this act of procrastination later?  How do parents manage to carve out time to even think about managing their time? It is trite and insufficient to state that being a parent is a full-time job. That's like calling military basic training a little retreat. You can't even complain about it. Complaining is interpreted as an admission that you dislike being a parent. I love being a parent, but parenting will eat all your time -- those two things are not in opposition. Kids eat time like minivans burn gas. When we had just one little guy, I did a better job of carving out a little time for myself. I grabbed an hour a day to workout, hang with friends, or play music. That hour made a huge difference. A little goes a long way. I was in better shape, my moods were stable, and ...

Embrace the chaos

If I could summarize what I've learned about life during these first four years of being a dad, it would be that love is such a small word for such a big, profound, and multidimensional thing. Cheez aside, the other significant lesson I've learned is the value of embracing chaos and uncertainty. By embrace, I really mean acceptance. I do not mean to intentionally create chaos or something. I mean to let go of the overwhelming desire to control situations and all outcomes. Bottom line is that Little Man has no interest in conforming to all of my expectations or needs, and I've learned to be ok with that. I won't lie though. The chaos and uncertainty have worn me down at times. The screaming at 2am, then 4am, then 5am... the tantrums at dinner, the food thrown on the floor... the poop blowouts, the perfectly-aimed golden showers... the car rides with demon boy  -- these experiences can not be endured without anguish. No degree of Buddhist enlightenment can shield you from...