Tag: #StayathomeDad

  • The Day Went Sideways

    I thought I had a plan for today.

    That was my first mistake.

    What I had set out to do today was help out my friends. They had rented a car, and to help save them some dollars, I offered to drive them to the rental place, which was in New Jersey. Not really a big deal, just across the George Washington Bridge.

    Well…

    Nothing is easy in New Jersey.

    It took over three hours to pick them up, drop them off and get home. They say New York City has emptied out… but not on the GWB.

    By the time I had got home, I had lost the time I had set aside to blog and work on the novel. (Clearly, I’m blogging now, but I’m doing it while the kid is running around the park. Not the most attentive parent today.) I am afraid that the novel won’t get any attention and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

    But that’s okay.

    I don’t want to beat myself up if I don’t work on every project, every day. It was a good thing that I helped out my friends and got to spend time with them. Things go sideways, that’s just life. I need to be more forgiving to myself, and be more confident that I am committed to following through on writing.

  • Making Time to Write, Again

    Today has gone better, when it comes to making time to write.

    I have stuck to the schedule and I was able to get some journal time in at the park. About 30 minutes, total. Luckily, the kid has started to make friends with the other regular children at the playground, which leads to the air of stability for both of us.

    I am in the afternoon quiet playtime section of the day, where the kid plays in her room, and I finish up my chores, and get about 30 minutes on the couch to do this; blog.

    I am trying not to delve in on the news of today, as I know that will be a distraction for me. I am working at staying focused on finishing this. Then I will have some art time with the kid-o, which can be a fun creative outlet, a palate cleanser so to speak. Then I will let the kid have an hour of free TV time, which will give me a chance to get back to the novel, which sadly, a month has passed since I worked on it last.

    As I go through all of these motions, I am aware enough to know that I will need to repeat this process for at least two to eight months for this habit to form. It does feel like I am the sideshow magician spinning plates, trying to keep everything going.

  • Scheduling Writing Time in a Pandemic

    There might be a lot to unpack in this statement, but I have the feeling that kids will not physically go to school in New York for the first few months of the school year. My guess is that there will at least be two months of remote learning, and that’s if a safe and effective vaccine can be developed. (But this is a topic for another blog.) With that said, I don’t think I will have a few hours to write every day, as I will need to be the kid’s teacher for the foreseeable future.

    So, I need to look for the time in our schedule to make writing happen.

    Right now, I’m getting about two hours in on a perfect, everything breaks my way, kind of day. I can get about 30 to 45 minutes to journal in the morning, when me and the kid have some park time. The kid used to take a daily nap, but that has morphed into “Quiet Playtime” in the kid’s room, and depending on how much I have to clean the kitchen up after lunch, I can fit 30 minutes of blog time. Finally, the kid has an hour of free tv time, which I sit with her and monitor, and that is when I can fit in an hour to work on other things. I used to try and write in the evening, but that’s the only time me and the wife get to have some time together, and that’s pretty important to us. Since rarely does anything break my way, I’m lucky if I can get about 45 minutes to an hour day.

    What complicates this even more is that my wife is working from home, so the family desk is now her’s, and I haven’t found a good landing place to work in the apartment.

    So, as I look to the next month and Fall in general, I am trying to figure out what our schedule will be so everyone can get what they need, and I can still fit in a little more than 2 hours a day to write.

  • Pretty Much Back

    So… It’s been close to three months that I have been off of the blog, which is a very sad shame on my part.

    I feel compelled to update:

    I had a job, then my wife got a job, and we discovered that it was psychologically damaging our daughter to have both of us working from home, and both of us half-ass trying to help keep up with the kid’s school work. Then I got laid off from my job (thank you, Coronavirus) and I have become the stay at home dad now. I got the kid through her classes, and she has been promoted to go to kindergarten, and I am trying very hard to keep her skills up by working on her reading, writing, and math over the summer. I also quit drinking over the month of June, and did not gain any helpful benefits from doing that, and in fact, I put on more weight. My unemployment claim was denied. People are moving out of New York City left and right, and the town feels like a husk of its former self, and pretty much every day, the world feels like it’s coming to an end, but we are protesting with the hope that up until the end, if we survive, we’ll have a better world to live in.

    Oh, and I don’t have health insurance, and I started a novel, but hey, I bet half of NYC can say the same thing right now.

    How are you?

    74CFDC01-DCD5-4C18-AB29-9AC9E4471CFF_1_105_c