Nothing strikes fear in the heart of this work at home mom as the dreaded sick day. Scheduled days off on the school calendar and even a snow day are nothing compared to the sick day. You can plan ahead for the day off and generally a snow day is forecast a few days ahead. You have warning to be prepared with backup child care plans or a special craft project or two.
The sick day begins in the wee hours of morning that leaves you with little sleep and a very demanding patient that you suddenly must take care of. What is a work at home mom to do? Luckily this is probably one of the reasons that you work from home in the first place. The to do list of work though, still needs to be taken care of.
I mostly go the route of counting this day as a complete loss for work. No matter how many crafts, videos or books that I may send my daughter’s way, she just really wants me when she is not feeling well. Me to snuggle with her and read her a story. Me to make her a snack or fix her some chamomile tea with honey.
Which means that I have to be able to let go of the idea of getting any intense work done. Days like this are good for following up on emails, reading some articles that I’ve been stockpiling for a quiet moment, or finally getting to the ebook that has been sitting on my desktop waiting to be read.
I find that the real challenge is getting motivated back to work after having this kind of day. One thing that works for me, is to write down everything that I think of that needs doing during the course of the sick day. That way I have a plan of attack for the next work day rather than spending the day trying to get back on track.
I would love to know how you deal with days when your kids are home from school sick.
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My youngest was home sick yesterday (again) with some asthma issues ~ usually he occupies himself for most of the day with a Star Wars marathon. Usually I can still get quite a bit of work done and I’ll opt to do things I can do from my netbook while I hang out with him in the living room. Like you said, email follow ups, article writing, general research, that kind of thing. Sometimes I surprise myself by getting a big chunk of stuff done when one of the boys is sick.