Sick Children & Academic Work Days/Schedules

It is hard to work when one's child is sick, but K & I have been juggling our boys' sicknesses and not skipping work (i.e. teaching our classes). That's one of the many good things about an academic (or, in my case, "pseudo-academic" ;) career -- it generally gives you more flexibility.


We didn't really work on it this semester as we should have (except for office hours), but K and I will probably try to always teach at different times so we can "juggle" the kids if needed. I will never forget those days back in 2002 when I would hand newborn Kelvin to K so I could go teach my class and then I'd get him back after the class period and go home. We did that for two years (including one summer session [class almost 4h long, baby 4 months old], night teaching [2.5 h] and one winter session) and it worked just fine!

What complicates matters considerably now is that we live about 20 miles away from the university, so when the kids are sick and we want to teach anyway (this is what I did today -- after all, I only want to miss a teaching day when I am sick, not my children!), we have to drag their poor sick selves to the university with us for a couple of hours.

Last semester Kelvin stayed in my office for 1h15 minutes one day with a high fever, poor thing, while I taught my class and the next day he had to stay at his dad's lab for a couple of hours. Today, I had to cancel appointments with five students in the morning because Linton woke up with a stomach bug. I didn't want to miss teaching my class, though, so I put him in the car, brought him to K's office (where the poor boy had to stay by himself for about 15 minutes until dad finished teaching his class), taught my class and 2h later came to pick him up and bring him back home.

It worked out fine, but only because K didn't have to teach and could stay with Linton while directing a student at the lab. Tomorrow K will stay home from the university in the morning (since he doesn't teach until 12:30pm) while I go in early for office hours and teaching. The boys have a half day of school tomorrow because it's ski day (I doubt poor Linton will go), so K will have to bring them to the university to teach his class and I'll pick them up in his office at 1:50pm... Sigh...

Talk about Tag Team Parenting! (which used to be the very fitting name of my friend Aliki's old blog).