"Oh, you’re so lucky, I'd love to work at home."
If you're a work-at-home parent, you've heard that plenty of times. But the vision doesn't always match up to the reality. My daughter's sudden and immediate need for something, anything, from me RIGHT THIS SECOND is in direct proportion to the importance of the call I am taking. When she was a baby, before we owned a laptop, her reluctance to take a damn nap already was also correlated to my desperate need for an uninterrupted hour or so to work –and she would unerringly wake up crying just as I got that crucial call to be able to meet a deadline on time.
I'm lucky in that most of the people I deal with on a daily basis are fairly child-friendly, or at least not completely put off an impression of professionalism by hearing "Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. I want milk. I need milk. Mommy!" too many times throughout a conversation. And of course, there are our friends Dora and Elmo. Yeah, I said it.
This article from Parenting.com via CNN contains some helpful ideas for parents trying to balance work and child-raising in the same space. Some are no-brainers – have a basket of small toys in your work area so your children can play while you work. Others, though, are things I never thought of — make sure your wastebasket is secure, for example, and back up computer files weekly. I would add "Don’t leave wet fingerpainting projects where the cat can walk through them while you're taking a call from your most impossible client" but that's another story.
