Work From Home Couple

Weekends are supposed to be times of leisure, right? Well, when both you and your spouse work from home, there’s often little difference between a weekend and a weekday.

Take yesterday, for instance. The deadline is fast approaching for my wife’s play, a musical version of A Christmas Carol for which she is providing, and creating, all the costumes. My wife pretty much sat behind her sewing machine — taking the odd break to hustle to the fabric store to pick up some missing pieces — most of the day. She held out until 9 p.m., when she, I and our 9-year-old son sat down to watch Kung Fu Panda. (Mini-review of that movie: It’s OK. Not nearly as good as I’d thought it be from all the positive reviews.)

This is one of the pitfalls of working from home. Sure, there are plenty of office workers who work weekends. But when you’re used to working from home, used to treating your home as part living area/part office, it’s easier to log long hours on the weekend. Sometimes it’s necessary, too.

You have to be careful, though, to turn off the work. Sometimes you just have to relax. When you work from home, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’ll just work on one more thing. Suddenly, that one thing becomes two, three or four, and before you know it, three more hours have ticked off the clock.

So be careful. As far me? I had a fairly relaxing day. I took our two sons to the local ice cream parlor for an end-of-the-season party celebrating our older son’s undefeated under-10-year-old season. I took in a couple of quick games of chess with my older son, played extensively with our 1-year-old, did slip in some work and, of course, watched Kung Fu Panda. I’ll wager that I’m a bit more relaxed today than is my wife.

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