How do you get through holidays and festive season working with kids?

Lynne Level 1

November 8, 2016, 12:08 pm

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Ok so Christmas is looming again and I am starting to feel tired already.

We have our long school holidays over Christmas in South Africa and I find it so hard. Usually my husband doesn't get much leave over Christmas yet my kids are home for anything from 4 to 6 weeks!

Then just to add things to the stress my family usually come over. In one way it makes it a little easier with my parents being here because they can look after my kids quite a lot so I can get some work done.

However they travel about 350 kms to come spend time with me and my family so I can't exactly hide away and let them look after my kids!

In addition they only come for about a week leaving another 3 - 5 weeks to get through.

Last Christmas I worked any chance I got during the day which wasn't much and then I waited until everyone went to bed at night and worked as much as I could. So I worked from about 10pm - 3am every night.

Needless to say I nearly killed myself LOL. I came close to burning out and I had to just stop working for the last week.

How do you manage and do you have any tips or advice? My kids are five years old and nearly three years old!

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TommyCarey

Working during the holidays is tough, but it's a necessity if we want to put food on the tables

I usually ramp up my marketing and advertising to pull in a good amount of sales so that I can have a lot of orders to work on a few weeks before Christmas. I'll usually get most of it done before Christmas and then I'll pause all my campaigns between the December 24th and January 2nd. This allows me to spend a week with my family and I don't have to worry about missing anything at Christmas or New Years

I don't worry too much about Thanks Giving because it's just one night of work that I'll miss. I'll usually try to get a bunch of work done the few days prior to turkey day so that I don't worry too much about getting hit with a ton of work on that Friday when I'm hungover from eating too much turkey

It's definitely tough working online, or offline, when you have kids. My girlfriend and I have a 7 (almost 8) year old who is pretty active and wants to be doing something all the time. I try to get a lot of work done late at night after 9pm when she goes to bed. Sometimes I'll be awake til 3am and then I'll have to bring her to school at 7am. But when she's not in school I'll have to just work when she's home and after she goes to bed.

Sometimes I'm a little tired during the day, but she understands that I have to work in order to buy her stuff

With you having 2 kids that are 5 and under I'm sure it's much more difficult for you. But I'm sure you can do it

10 years ago