| We have 2 toddlers; double-income household. We live at the edge of a small city center in Belgium. Originally, we both worked full time, lived in a small house, and had income to spare to save some and do some small-scale travelling within Europe. With no kids, there was not really a lot of stress and "busyness" for us; the household chores had to be done in the evenings and weekends, but other than that we didn't feel overwhelmed. (Although it sometimes did feel that way anyway.) After the first kid was born, my girlfriend started working 80% instead of 100%, to cope better with the additional tasks imposed by caring for the child. The second kid added to the child care burden, leading us to delegate some of the cleaning chores to a household helper (4hrs every 2 weeks), which is not for free. The situation stabilized, but we do feel overwhelmed by the tight planning of each day, and chores left to do in the evenings and weekends. Weekends are not always relaxing any more: even family visits have a tendency to start feeling like a burden if they displace other things that you have to do, and if several of them queue up in the same weekend or if several consecutive weekends become fully booked this way. Also, we try to build in "down"time in the weekend to let the kids play or to do something with the 4 of us, but this becomes more difficult with all the other engagements competing for time. I too have requested a contract change to work 90% instead of 100%, so that I can move some of the chores from the evening and weekend to a weekday. This will hopefully leave us with more relaxed evenings and weekends. I realize that in some sense we're lucky that our finances permit us to trade some income for more time off work. I think (hope) we're approaching a OK balance between work, child care, "obligatory" off-work stuff, and "voluntary" off-work stuff. (Note: 100% means 40hrs/wk here) |