work life balance tips, making time spent with your children quality

Even though I am finally back working in London I’m still not able to spend much time at all during the weekdays with my kids. Much like many of you, I’m constantly late out of the door, trying to get myself and the kids ready and off to nursery in the morning is a frantic rush before oftentimes missing my train (or equally getting to the platform on time for the train to be delayed or cancelled).

Just when you really need a train to come on time…

In the evenings I get back around their bedtimes, either they’re in bed or it’s my task to get two tired irritable children to sleep. Not really an ideal chance to spend any quality time with the children, much less spend time teaching them to read or write.

When there was one child I was able to spend maybe ten or twenty minutes before bed time reading to them and teaching them numbers and letters, several songs. But with two children when the baby is wailing current strategy is to get the older one settled as fast as possible before attending to the baby. The reasoning I’ve put behind this is that (regardless of what I do) a baby is going to cry, but if a three year old child starts crying to exhaustion then

a) the noise is multiplied much more and

b) I’ll have two crying children trying to get to sleep.

Bedtime and morning routines aside, what time is there to spend with them during the weekdays?

When there was just one child I started getting up earlier and when I felt brave enough I’d wake the older child up early and get him ready with a view to read a book to him and teach him some letters and numbers. When the second child came along, the chances of reading have gone out of the window. Now even if I do get an opportunity to read to them, I’m struggling holding two kids and several books, I’m not able to give either of them the reading time they need.

I balance a toddler who is climbing all over the place and snatching books away from the other child.

Although what I have started doing recently is reading a page of each of their books together, i.e. one page of The Tiger Who Came to Tea and followed by a page on Busy Bear’s Party and then turn both pages over, makes for a very peculiar story.

This is as tidy as the bookshelf gets nowadays

In fact this very morning (when writing this post – I write the posts on the train to work if you wondered) I noticed a mother with a book reading to her child. This strikes me as a good idea, I’ll start to institute this on the way to nursery, it’s a five minute journey, I’ll report back on how I get on.

Try to put in a different book into the bag, let the child choose the book, be careful not to overdo it as there is some value in looking out of the window and learning about the world on the ride to nursery/school.

The wider question is how do you manage to spend time with your kids during the working week or if you are currently job hunting how do you manage to spend time, quality time doing valuable things with your kids. I’ve considered a lunchtime phone/skype call when I have a chance or phoning them when I’m walking to the station.

When I was working abroad, I did use Skype in the mornings, there was a five hour time difference between Canada and the UK.

I would Skype at 8am in the morning, I could take my iPad out onto the porch and show them what Canada looked like, the older boy really loved it. When I was away in Bristol for ten months I would phone every evening and teach my boy to count, I managed to get him to count up to twenty over the phone.

Please share your stories of if/how you manage to spend time during the weekdays in the comment box below. Do you spend time together early before going to work, do you get home early, do you have a phone call during the day or like me do you save it all up and make sure they have a fantastic event filled weekend? I’d love to know.

Thanks for reading.

Farhan