Early Summer Holidays

It’s day 2 of the summer holidays and I think it’s going to be a long one! We’re still working out how to handle parenting and being back at work with 3 children off school/nursery and at home all day. It’s almost entirely falling to my wife and she’s started off strong: the kids are doing reading, maths, have been to Piglets for the day and are having a great time. However, it’s clearly a lot of work and I don’t think she’ll be able to keep up with it.

I’m mainly shutting myself away in the annexe and working a crazy amount of hard - lots of LLM-assisted data work, none of which really gives me the time to gather.

At some point, we’ll find a new balance but as the activities continue (swimming and taekwondo aren’t stopping during the summer, and dancing is still on for a week or two) and the work piles up, I’m aware that my wife is likely to reach breaking point sooner or later.

Next week there’s tennis camp which might help (taking 2 children out of the equation for a few hours) but then a mega-trip up to her parents with all the children for up to 5 days. Pray for her, dear reader. Pray for her.

I have to decide whether to do something outlandish (fly to New York/Pisa/somewhere for a week), slightly landish (train to Oxford, go back to Chesterfield), or perfectly vanilla (maybe get a takeaway one night). For now, I haven’t planned anything so I’m tending towards the latter but you never know.

Let this serve as a reminder - the 49 days of the summer holidays started well and frantically, and I’m impressed with my wife’s ability to handle it. Long may it continue.