Kerry’s maternity leave doesn’t finish for about six weeks, but she went into work today in order to participate in some team building exercises. This gave us both a little bit of insight into how things are going to be in a couple of months when she’s back to the daily grind. She told me that her heart sank a little bit when she was stood at the station waiting for the train to take her away from her family for the rest of the day. However I’m sure it didn’t sink half as deep as mine as I watched her leave the house at 6:30am knowing I was going to have sole responsibility for Amy and Evan until 7pm that evening.
I’ve always had one day a week where I look after Amy while Kerry works. We both work only four days a week, and historically I have had Amy on a Wednesday and Kerry has her on a Friday. I love this arrangement, and would not swop my Wednesdays off for double my salary.
However it has become blatantly apparent that I am completely unable to multi-task. I have been able to either spend time with my daughter or maintain a tidy and hygienic home, it’s one or the other with no possibility of a compromise. I know that it sounds hideously sexist and I promise it’s not that I haven’t tried, I once even managed to reach mid morning with a patch of the living room floor still visible through the layers of crap. But invariably Kerry would return home to find both of us grinning sheepishly surrounded in rubble and the detritus of half a dozen abandoned craft projects.
Quite frankly I was dreading the prospect of adding a baby into the mix. A full day of a two children to one adult ratio filled me with a sense of dread. Sure, I have already had the odd afternoon when I’ve taken care of both of them on my own. But my incompetence and inability to cope with more than one thing at once made me wonder how I even manage to breath and walk at the same time. While I was looking after one child the other was or getting themselves wedged between the cushions on the couch or carelessly wandering into the jaws of a sprung mantrap. In addition each child vied for my undivided attention in their own particular way - Evan by going from whimper to wail in 3.5 seconds, and Amy by systematically progressing through the naughtiness scale until I was forced to intervene.
So today I cheated and bundled both of them into the car and off to the playgym to meet my Mum. When we eventually got back they were so exhausted that they both went to sleep for about three hours. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
To be fair to myself I did manage to cope with them for the four hours before we left for the playgym, and also the two hours between them waking up and Kerry getting home. And while the house was certainly no tidier, it wasn’t much more messy either.
I’m still glad we didn’t have triplets though.
Oh, man, I was slightly there at one point. When LA Toddler was born, my wife took off 10 weeks for her maternity leave. Then I took 8 weeks off after that for my turn. It was a scary prospect, for sure.
I did manage to get through it, but the house was never as neat and tidy as I had promised. Dinner was never made and we had a lot of delivery. But I did manage to relax every afternoon when it was time for the nap. That was the point that I remembered to breathe…
I’ll clean the house properly after the kids are grown.
Getting dudelet to tidy up after himself is my current project when we’re left to ourselves. I’ll get on to training him to stack the dishes in the dishwasher when we can afford a new set of crockery.
I really want to see how you define the ‘naughtiness scale’! Would it start with ‘mild negativity’ and work through to ‘major non-local conflagration’ via ‘downloading anarchists cookbook’?
If you superglue them to the sofa they can only make a mess immediately around them and can’t wander into mantraps *grin*
i’m still rather enjoying easy peasy lemon squeezy.
that’s a parental phrase if i ever heard one!