Parent Time

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Summer Sanity Saver Checklist

Emilie Bailey is meticulously pinning the front of a blue formal dress on her young client when a piece of paper slides under the door. It’s a practice sheet for telling time. Surprise, exasperation and resignation cross her face in quick succession. But as a mom, she’s also amazed at how creatively persistent her son can be, and begins to laugh.

“I’m done now,” says her six-year-old from the other side of the door, having slipped her the proof. “Can I come in?”

“Daniel, I said I’d let you know when we’re finished,” says the seamstress, who works out of her home in Mossley, Ontario.

“I just want to play on the computer,” he wheedles. “I promise I won’t peek.”

The interruptions continue all afternoon: Bailey has to chase her two dogs into the house after Daniel and his seven-year-old brother, Jonathan, let them out, despite several requests from mom to LEAVE THEM INSIDE, PLEASE! There’s been light tapping on the door and a barrage of requests to come into her studio to play on the computer. Bailey valiantly struggles for composure, intent on finishing the dress fitting. When she finally wraps up and emerges from the studio, she’s confronted with chocolate-covered faces and hands. Sigh.

Working from home when you have school-aged kids is terrific for nine months of the year. There’s peace and quiet from 8:30 to four, and you can be there for them after school and when they’re sick. But come summer (and over the winter holiday and March break, for that matter), the house of cards collapses. After all, you can only program your kids so much. There comes a time when they don’t want to do back-to-back day camps or spend a week at grandma’s with no friends around. They want to hang out at home, and they want you to be their entertainment coordinator.

Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. When I embarked on my freelance-writing career in 1995, my daughter Jennifer was nine. My office was in a corner of the family room, and there it stayed for five years. While trying to meet deadlines, I listened to Jenn and her friends chatting at the dining-room table outside my door, dealt with arguments about TV time and handled a host of family emergencies, including scraped knees and hurt feelings, that couldn’t wait until I got off the phone. It was so relaxing.

During the school year I could count on six hours to work, but summer was madness. Jenn hated any kind of camp and couldn’t seem to occupy herself for more than 30 minutes. After the first year I realized I’d have to focus more on her needs and less on my work for sanity’s sake. We opted for outings during the day, swimming lessons and visiting friends. I did most of my work at night and on weekends.

For Bailey, the situation is similar. She set up her business, Sew n Sew Seamstress Service, in her home 12 years ago and it has flourished. But she will turn work away in the summer because of the balancing act with her sons underfoot.

“I used to make the mistake, especially when they were smaller, of thinking, ‘OK, I’ve got to get this and this and this done and then I’ll do something with you guys.’ I thought we could make a deal, but little kids don’t make deals like that. All I did was fight with them during the time I had put aside to work. So I discovered that if I had some fun with them first, I could bring them home and then do my work. They would watch a TV show and have a snack quite happily because they’d had a fun outing and were tired.”

Bailey’s busiest time of year is during the wedding season, when bridal parties are in full swing. Sometimes the bride insists on having the entire wedding party in for a fitting at the same time. Doing fittings, especially for five bridesmaids, is persnickety work. Now add two little boys with lots of energy to this picture and things get chaotic — quickly.

Her description of what can happen sounds like a scene from Rugrats. Picture the boys on a hot summer day with Popsicle juice dripping down their arms. One runs in saying “Mom, Johnny hit me.” They ricochet through the room, planting finger and nose prints on the mirror because “it’s fun.” Window cleaner and rag in hand, Bailey tries to remove the smudges so the bride can view her dress, all the while hissing, “No, don’t touch that with your sticky fingers. Get away.”

On the upside, says Bailey, “The kids are great for giving compliments because they really like everything I make, especially the wedding dresses. And when the bride’s dressed, I’ll open the door and they’ll say, ‘Wow! You look like a princess.’ So you try to get them in on that and then you’ve got the bride sold on her dress!”

But there are days when everything falls apart. Like the afternoon when about ten clients came through the door. In between appointments, Bailey checked on the boys, who were supposed to be playing in the backyard in the sprinkler. Her first peek revealed that they’d removed the sprinkler from the hose. Next time, the spot where the sandbox stood was a pile of gushy mud with kids sitting in it. Later, she found the clean clothes on the line all splattered with mud. Ditto the dog and kids. Bailey remembers marching them all upstairs to the bathtub while clients deftly dodged the little mud-caked bodies.

Sarah Hughes, who runs Narrative Books (distributor of family therapy books and journals) out of her home in Rossland, BC, can relate. She and her husband, Brian Taylor, who also works from home, have three kids: Bailey, six, Claire, four, and Jasper, two. “Brian usually takes the kids in the morning and I have them in the afternoon, and we fight over who gets to work after dinner,” says Hughes with a good-natured laugh.

From September to June the kids are in school or playschool and daycare, at least part of the day. But when school ends so does everything else. “We don’t have any outside child care, so it’s all up to us,” says Hughes.

At least, she adds, “We live in a community where lots of people are doing the same thing so there are lots of times when I’ll take somebody’s kids for a hike one day, and the next day they’ll take my kids to the beach. But since I have three kids they’ll usually take two out of three, so I have to be more creative and spread them across families,” she laughs.

The general challenge is just organizing your time, says Hughes. “It’s really easy to feel like you’re not doing either job very well. Try to be businesslike on the phone when there’s a baby in the background or somebody yelling, ‘Mom, can you wipe my bum?’ or one of those great questions. It’s hard.”

There are days when she tries to work with all three children at home. If they co-operate she can set them up next to her in the office with Bailey playing on a computer, Claire drawing and Jasper napping. But inevitably things will unravel. “I was trying to leave a message on someone’s answering machine at a university one day and I had set Claire up to watch a movie and I put a box of books outside for the courier to pick up. So I’m leaving this long message on the answering machine and Claire comes screaming into the office, “A man is stealing something from our porch!”

I wish I could tell Bailey and Hughes that things get better, but the truth is, the challenges just change as kids get older. Suddenly it’s mom’s taxi service to the mall or to friends’ houses: “Pleeeeeeeeze Mom! I really need to go!” Then there’s the tug-of-war for the phone when your child calls every friend she knows because she’s bored. And let’s not forget those hormonal fluctuations that escalate into screaming matches. That’s when I find myself muttering: Six weeks down. Three to go. I love my kids. I love the summer. I love working at home. Please give me the strength to survive — and enjoy! — this summer before I go nutso!

August 2002