Just looking for some perspective on my own situation. Dh and I have 4 kids aged 10 and under. Since our eldest was born, I’ve done a mix of part time and full time wfh, sometimes within 9-5 hours, sometimes more flexible work that I did in the evenings.
However, I recently went back to a FT office based job and am still trying to get my head around the total lack of time for myself and everything else in general. I leave for work at 8am, dh drops the kids to school and then goes to work himself. I work through til 5, then pick the kids up from the cms at 530 and get home for 6. 2 evenings a week there’s activities that I drop to, and dh picks them up on his way home.
Once we get home, it’s a flurry of cooking dinner and doing the bedtime routine. I try to batch cook at the weekend where possible to speed this up but it still takes time to get dinner on the table. Kids are in bed by 830pm, we do some reading and then I usually crash into bed at 9/930pm to watch a few hours of tv with dh.
It just feels so relentless! I enjoy my job but there’s so little time for anything else. When I did wfh 9-5pm I felt like I had more time to myself, maybe because of the lack of commute (it currently takes 30m to get to work), and almost an hour to get home when you factor in collecting from cms.
How can I carve out more time??