DH mum is in our bubble, but lives a few hours away in a rural location. He’s worried she’s quite lonely and has proposed we go and stay with her for a couple of weeks with the children age 7 and 5. Kids delighted as they love her massive garden and dogs and are bored of same scenery every day at home.
DH would work while we are there, fine, but his hours are long and we wouldn’t see him from 7am-gone 8pm. My work is freelance and to and extent I can pick and choose my hours, so organising homeschooling inevitably falls on me. That works OK at home as I have p/t childcare which keeps things ticking over.
How will I get any work done at MIL’s? I ask him. He says: MIL can do homeschool for 3 days a week. But she is not IT literate and I know I’d be called to help every 5 minutes when someone can’t logon or someone doesn’t know where the assignment has been posted etc etc. And there would be the inevitable showing her how it all works, timetable and getting her used to it, which would take ages anyway.
Ok, he says, organise some p/t emergency childcare at MILs (our nanny can’t travel). Apparently that’s simple. Even IF we could find someone in a rural location at late notice happy to do the hours needed in middle of pandemic, organising said nanny inevitably would fall on me and there are always early teething troubles.
Fine, he says, just take some time off. I could, it’s not a big deal, but I have just taken the whole of half term off to spend some proper time with kids! No, we don’t need the income my work brings but I like my job and it’s important to me.
This is before we’ve even get to the fact that it’s ME who would have to pack up two weeks’ worth of homeschool books, laptops etc etc and clothes for the kids. Organise an online shop so they/we have all the food we need and everything else you need to think of when packing up your life for 2 weeks. Apparently none of this is ‘that hard’ to sort. Like fuck it isn’t!!
everything ticks along nicely at home with this arrangement with me doing to bulk of the childcare/school stuff, when I am not working, and organising the nanny when I am, but AIBU in thinking this level of wife work is taking the piss?