Everyone else is looking like they are paying attention at the weekly planning meeting. Your boss seems very earnest. Meanwhile you are doodling emergency holiday cover plans for the kids after your carefully knitted previous plans crashed and burned at the last minute when your childcare person fled the country, came down with the bubonic plague, eloped with your husband. What to do? Never fear, WorkingMums is here.
1. Planning holidays is a critical parental skill. You have to be cut-throat. There will always be some bastard somewhere who has got in there two years early and hoovered up all the school holiday times. Try to negotiate with this person or bribe them. Appeal to parental solidarity and set up a holiday share scheme. If this fails, sob incontrollably all over them.
2. It is wise to plan ahead, but don't get too smug. Schools love to throw in an inset day at the last minute or some sort of lovely parental occasion. They are also only likely to tell you about the discount holiday playscheme they have organised the week before it is due to start and after you have paid a small fortune for the private holiday playscheme on the other side of town. Leaving things to the last minute can sometimes count in your favour. Of course, you could be left having to take your children into work with you.
3. Check out all the holiday playschemes. Try and con some other parent into forking out as well and then your child will be happier about going. Look for schemes that have activities which might appeal to your child. Try and get some ideas off other working mothers who have older children and have been there before you. This may be hard as they are likely to be the only other people who are doing a half-minute mile to get out of the school and into the car/train/etc on the way to work.
4. Throw yourself on the mercy of family. Even distant aunts. Family will usually not demand any kind of practical or financial return for helping out. You may pay back psychologically, of course, but that is the whole point of families. Friends will always want some sort of quid pro quo, even if they are too nice to say so.
5. Do not spend long hours fantasising about term-time only work and seeking out teacher training schemes unless they are entirely realisable. It will only slow down the search for a practical short-term solution to the problem.
6. Panic.
7. Throw yourself on the mercy of your partner's boss - if you have a partner. If not, panic.
8. Curse yourself for not having thought out a longer term strategy which involved going to all those mother-child things in the first few months where they talk endlessly about breastfeeding and weaning until you feel that the old you has slowly ebbed away and been replaced by a mother and baby manual. If you had just hung in there you could have a huge network of people you could rely on for doing the odd day here and there over the holidays.
9. Cultivate helpful neighbours. This is a minefield. How well do you actually know them?
10. Sleep even less than usual and lower your immune system. Hang around people who have horrible colds. Sit next to them on buses and trains. Breathe deeply. Sickness could be your salvation.
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