School Cancellation - Home Life Thoughts

essie14

Sat, Mar 14 2020, 11:52 pm

I love my kids but entertaining them usually includes a lot of time at the park, museums, malls, playdate, etc. All of which are closed and canceled. And I have to work.
When I dont work on chol hamoed, for example, we dont just sit at home. But that's what we need to do now and it's very difficult.

amother

Periwinkle

Sat, Mar 14 2020, 11:57 pm

amother [ Bisque ] wrote:

you will manage the same way you manage on a sunday when your kids are not in school or on shabbos or Yom Tov .
I dont get why people HAVE kids if they cant manage them without sending them off to school or babysitters. If you cant manage your brood all at home with you dont have so many.

I don’t work on Sunday. I will still be working full time bH
And even those who don’t work it is difficult for many children to be home all day every day in close quarters. It’s not normal events that ppl need to plan for when having babies. If you’ll only have children based on pandemic situations then that a bleak life.

amother

Mauve

Sun, Mar 15 2020, 3:27 am

Regardless if school is cancelled or not my kids are being pulled out for time being. I have a kid on chemo.
I will still have to work though (from home) and my husband will probably continue working, though he has a semi private office.

No lying though, it’ll be challenging to be cooped up with 4 kids in abt 700 sq ft, with no porch/backyard and not having my usual volunteers who take the kids out 2x a wk.

We’ll make the best though beh. No pesach cleaning on my agenda now and just 100% kids all day. I think I’ll rent an apt for pesach so we can just ‘sell’ ours...

May Hashem watch over us all

baby12x

Sun, Mar 15 2020, 4:28 am

I get paid every hour I work.
Now with the kids home I am not sure how many hours I can feasibly get in.
This will be very tough for us. We have an emergency fund but its pretty low. We never were able to put tons of money away.

Right now, I am working on mitigating the damage and trying to work as much as possible and spend as little as possible

amother

Pumpkin

Sun, Mar 15 2020, 4:33 am

I am an attorney and will be working remotely full-time with all my usual responsibilities, plus considerable additional work generated by this pandemic. DH will also be working full time, though his workload may wind up being somewhat reduced during this period. We are in the process of setting up babysitting.

amother

Orchid

Sun, Mar 15 2020, 4:52 am

I am lucky. My kids are in an online school year-round. (Over 7 of them kah) so I have been doing this for a while. Last summer I had all of them at home for the majority of the summer, with little access to transportation and few friends in the area.

So I have A LOT of experience.

One thing I do is not allow "I am bored." If you are bored I will give you a job. If you are not bored, but want ideas of what to do, I sometimes have a list of ideas (even better if you make the list on slips of paper and have them pick one from a jar).

I let the kids Whatsapp video call their friends a lot. I try NOT to let them watch videos all the time, I save those for an incentive.

Toys, books, games, crafts, workbooks, activity books are all good ideas. Today, Shabbos, my kids (ages 1-12) played with balloons (blown up before Shabbos), played spot-it, uno, spaghetti and meatballs with books, built magnatiles with mentchies, built duplo, had a short halacha shiur with my husband (with nosh), I read them a story, and we ate the seudah together. After havdalah they played some more, got ready for bed, and listened to an audiobook in bed.

And yes, sometimes we go stir-crazy. I lock myself in my room or vent to a friend. My kids fight or tantrum.

On a good day I have the kids help me prepare the meals, or I do a live "cooking show" for them (I bring the food prep items to the table and narrate as I chop the vegetables, offer them tastes, etc.). I let them choose a picture to print and color. We use lots of charts, and the incentive is choosing a photo of yourself to print on your next chart when you complete the previous one.

(okay, enough for now...)