Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Hi. Welcome to the confessions in the Home Office podcast. My name is Wendy Hill, and for the past almost 20 years, I've been working out of my home and running my marketing consulting company while having kids in the house until just a couple of weeks ago. Now they're both in college. So by the end of this episode, you'll know a lot of strategies, tips, and tricks how to maintain your sanity while working from home with kids in the house, whether they're in the house part time, full time, or just once in a while. So here we go. The first thing that I want to talk about is creating separate spaces. So we are fortunate in our house that we have enough rooms and spaces where I have my office with two glass doors, I can see out and see what's going on. But I always made sure that the kids had places to work in the house, whether it was desk upstairs, like we have like a little office nook with outdoors upstairs at the top of our steps. And so they had desk there with lamps and supplies and that type of thing. So they had their own little space. And then if they felt like they needed to work a little bit closer to me, they had space in the kitchen and the dining room, which were on the other side of the downstairs of the house. But I could still kind of hear and see what was going on. So once in a while, we would eat in my office. I have a table and chairs in here also, but I tried to keep this my space. They can come in and talk whenever they wanted to, but I didn't want everybody working together. It was good to keep everybody separate. And that way, when I was done, close the doors and leave and go do things the rest of the day. So I think it's really important to make sure everybody has their own space in the house, even if it's something really small. But sharing a lot of spaces that can get really muddy and crazy and just can be a nightmare. So the second tip is work like crazy when the kids are out of the house. So I know if you drop the kids off at school in the morning or you dropping them off at a summer day camp, you'd like to come back home and just crash for a little bit. Believe me, I have felt this forever. But I have learned that if I can work and get as much stuff done while they're gone, when they're home later in the day, or if you, you know, whatever the schedule may be, that things are just better, I get everything done, and then if there's something that comes up or there's an emergency when they're home, then I can be there for that.
[00:02:29] So I think the big thing is prioritizing your schedule. I think I've talked about this on a couple of episodes before, about looking ahead on your calendar and making sure that you know what the next day and the next week or maybe in the next two weeks, bring for your schedule and figure out if they're going to be school from eight to two. That's when you work hard. Are they in an all day long summer camp for two weeks? You're going to get a lot of stuff done then. Not saying you should take some time for yourself if you can or if you need to, but really that is just keeps things most peaceful in the house is if you get everything done while they're gone. There's really no perfect balance. I talk about this all the time. I read so many things about balance and hear things about balance. Your life is never going to be completely balanced when you have kids. You know, the unexpected will happen just when you don't need it to. So you have to learn to be a master juggler if you're a mom or a dad who's juggling running a business and keeping taking care of kids. So you just have to learn to juggle. And the best way to do that is work ahead and plan. Does this work every day? No. And today is actually a great example. My daughter is a freshman in college. I have to go be interviewed for not have to. I'm excited to be interviewed on another podcast at eleven. And then I've got to go produce podcasts for a client this afternoon. She calls me deathly sick. She's only at school maybe like 30, 40 minutes from here. She can't even drive to the doctor's office. Her brother's busy. He's at the same school. So we're juggling. Where do we get her in? We can't get her in on campus. Where do we get her in for urgent care? My husband's got to drive after he finishes teaching today, all the way over there and pick her up and take her to the doctor. So I had all the stuff planned I was going to do this morning and I've been booking urgent care visits and checking with her and getting her driver's license to upload and all that stuff because she is too sick to do it.
[00:04:28] So life happens. But that's why I say looking ahead, planning ahead, working ahead is great.
[00:04:36] Another thing that I've also done is just, this is a little side note. It doesn't go, actually with when the kids are away to work.
[00:04:45] But I just thought about this building in buffers in your schedule. So let's say you're taking your kids to the dentist from three to four. Don't accept a phone call at 415. Don't plan on getting on a video call at 415 and being stressed and flying back home and all that. Give yourself some time. It takes me a long time to switch from one setting to another. Like, I'm going to a client office this afternoon. I won't be able to come back and just get on the phone and do something. I'll need a little time to figure out a what I missed, answer a few emails, kind of figure out if there's anything that else needs to be done, you know, make a few more phone calls. So I may not do any other calls this afternoon, but give yourself that time. If you need 30 minutes, an hour, whatever it is, usually there's not going to be something that's going to completely blow up if you don't take that call five minutes after you get out of the dentist. So that's all I have to say about that.
[00:05:39] Number three is you need a network. There's no way that you can run a business and have kids in and out of the house all day without some type of support. Support. At some point you might be super mom or super dad, and you say, I can get it done. I'm organized great. But like, today, somebody's sick in our family, so we have to have somebody to take my daughter to the doctor.
[00:06:06] Sometimes you're gonna have to travel for things. Sometimes you're just gonna have a meeting or you're just not gonna be able to get away. I was. And hopefully if you're married or have a partner, your partner can, can pick up and do some of that. So I was divorced for a really long time. I had my kids. Their father did not have any visitation with them except, like, on a weeknight, evening, or a weekend. Then later the courts gave me sole legal and physical custody. So it was Wendy and the two kids. So luckily, my parents are local. They helped. My dad was still working for a couple of years after all that happened, but my mom was able to help. But I also made sure that we had contacts in the neighborhood and contacts at elementary school and middle school, a couple people at the high school that were on the list that could pick up the kids or get help out on a mine. There's just no way you can do it alone. The other great thing that I found was babysitters. Whether you find somebody for the afternoon for pickup so you don't have to stop and do that. There's a lot of high school kids and technical school kids that are looking for great cash jobs like that. And then in the summers. Summers are hard for people who work from home because you think, oh, they're going to sleep, they're going to play, we'll get moving around lunchtime. That's not what happens. So even if you have a bunch of camps planned out, you're still going to have a lot of weeks with kids home, and you just can't run a business with them in and out all day long. It's not that you don't want to, it's just. It's really hard to focus. I had two girls, mainly, and then a couple others that were kind of like my summer nannies. They came in and helped get the kids ready in the morning. They would feed them lunch. They would play outside with them on, in their playhouse, their swing set. They would take the dogs for a walk. They would go to the pool. They taught them how to dive off the diving board. They got them ready so they could do swim team the next summer.
[00:08:01] Once a week, I gave them money to take them, like, to chick fil a or McDonald's, so that we would break up the week. So I really did that about four days a week. And what a relief. And even though it was expensive, it was worth every penny to know that I could work straight through. And these were girls who were going to be teachers, so they were on it. They were organized and structured. They were in college, and they would say, we've got it. And I knew that they had it. And so the kids were happy and entertained, and they did more for those kids than I probably could have those summers. So think about a network, and maybe it's trading off with somebody. Maybe it's just getting a sitter a couple hours a week, but maybe it's relatives or maybe it's a neighbor, but you got to have somebody who can help.
[00:08:45] The last thing, actually, number four, I've got five. The next thing that I want to talk about is shooting straight with my kids. So I'm not one of those moms who sugarcoats and hides a lot of things and says, oh, when, you know, when I'm 60, I'll start telling them some things that went on. They asked me a number of times when they were younger, why do you work from home? Like, they were glad I wasn't in an office. But why do you have to work? When we come home from school, you're still working, or why do you have to take these calls? Or why do you have to do this? So I explained to them that that's what I did for a living. And they still kind of looked at me with blank stare. So I sat down with them. Even at an early age, my son understood more than my daughter and talked about what it costs to live. And they were shocked how expensive it was. And that was a long time ago. Imagine if I was having that conversation for the first time today.
[00:09:38] But once they understood how much it cost, and I even talked to them about money coming in and where that went and that type of thing, they learned to appreciate that, hey, she's doing this for all of us. So did they still ask the question sometimes just because they're kids? Sure. Why are you working? Can't we go do this? That's all normal.
[00:09:59] But they learned what it took to run a household and why there was somewhat of the hustle to keep things moving and make sure that we produced work and that people were happy and that they paid and paid on time. And I had the discussion with my kids also after the divorce. Do you guys want to move somewhere else?
[00:10:21] Maybe we don't want to stay here anymore. This is a big house. We had a lot of things happen here. And we talked about it several times over about two years, and they both said, no, this is where we live. This is home. This is where we want to stay. So I said, okay, mom's going to have to work really hard to stay here and be here. This is not cheap. And so from that point on, I feel like we really became a team. Did they help out more around the house? Yes. Every time I asked, absolutely not. But I feel like they understood more that what it took, and it was going to take some work and some effort to just stay here. And they were helpful, and I feel like it helped them when they had started working or like, my son wanted to buy a car. They understood the financials better. And I don't feel like it put a lot of stress on them. I feel like it just gave them some knowledge, and there weren't that many aha moments as they got older.
[00:11:17] And then the last thing I want to talk about is, you kind of have to tailor working from home. It has to be a little bit different for each kid. So I have. I have two children. My son, he was on the podcast last week. He's calmer, he's laid back. He's lower energy. He can get crazy and wild, but he's a pretty good egg about things, and he will listen and he will behave most of the time. And I started the business because he was sick all the time and I needed more flexibility. We talked about this on an earlier episode, and so I remember being on calls and he would be home sick in a pack and play. Now, he might be throwing stuffed animals at my head while I was on the phone and kind of laughing, but he knew that if I was on the phone or I was staring at the screen talking to other people, he needed to be quiet or he needed to go in the other room and do something.
[00:12:09] So him being at home has not been that much of a challenge. Then my daughter comes along and she's three years younger, and she is all sparkle in fireworks. She is always on the move. She is always planning something. She always wants to know what's going on. And I could say to her, I have a call. I'm getting on a call in ten minutes. Don't come in my office until you see that I'm not on the phone anymore. Well, that didn't work for her. So, as I said, my doors are glass. I would be on the phone and suddenly I would see a sign that would come up and say we needed to discuss dinner. Or I would see another sign that she would write that would say, the guinea pigs are on my bed watching a movie. Or she would say, if that didn't get my attention, it would be, can I walk to cv's down the street by myself? That was a mile away. No, you're not doing any of that, so you never know. So she would be one to also kind of sneak in once in a while, wave at people on a Skype or a zoom. Or if she knew that I wasn't on camera, she would stand behind me in my chair, do my hair, do my makeup.
[00:13:16] I did learn my lesson once, to look in the mirror before I leave the house. She worked on my makeup one day while I was on the phone, and it was relaxing and it was fun, and I was. I was taking notes and talking to somebody. I didn't think anything about it. I left to go gas up the car for the next day. Did not look. Got to the gas station. Everybody's laughing at me, looking at me, snickering, but nobody's really making eye contact. I look in the mirror, she has put this goldish pink glitter stuff all over my face and, like, huge cat eyes and big red lips, and it was completely hidden. And as soon as I realized it and I looked at her, she ducked in the car. She knew what she had done. So with that, I'm just saying you kind of have to be able to be flexible and have a plan for each child in your house. They're not all going to be the same. Like I said, I could kind of tell my son what the day was going to look like. He's got it. He's out of the way. He's doing his thing. If he had his chores, he would get them done. My daughter, she's going to stir up trouble. If worse comes to worse, she is. You know, if. If she knows something's really important, she's going to behave, but she's definitely going to press my buttons and keep me entertained. I have never been bored since either one of them were born, but especially since she was born. So, anyway, those are my tips for today. I hope some of that helped. I know it's kind of all over the place, but, you know, when you work from home and a mom or a dad, you have to be flexible. You have to do some great planning. You have to have a good network, and you have to kind of keep a sense of humor. Even this morning when I was on trying to book an urgent care appointment, I'm getting frustrated. I'm getting grumpy. I can't get the insurance card to upload properly. Then I was like, you know, this is all going to be over in like five minutes, so you just have to take a deep breath and keep going and know that you're going to blink and they're going to be out of the nest. And that's where I am now. And I think about all the stuff that's gone on, and it seemed like it happened over a two week period. So what is that saying? Like, the days are, the days are long, but the years are short. That is so, so true. So that's it for this episode of Confessions in the home Office. I'll be back next week to talk about something else. And make sure you subscribe. Hit the subscribe or follow button on whatever video or podcast platform that you use. That way you'll get notified when the next episode comes out. So thanks so much for watching. Take care.
