[VLM]

Not being at work is understandable and mentally filtered out. Nobody really cares if you're sick or your kid is sick, or you're on vacation, either way you're not there.

When you're present, people DO notice who spends two hours a day talking about golf or football or facebook or talking on the phone. Don't be that guy. Work at work, play at home, and you'll appear (and be) much more productive for 8 hours than the guy who works 6 hours and plays 6 hours while physically in the office for 12 each day.

Abstractly, someone home with a sick kid is probably sitting in the same room with the kid and occasionally nursing the kid while spending most of the time playing minecraft or Eve or posting on HN or whatever. But what people actually remember is the guy who spent his entire afternoon birthday party shopping on amazon, or the guy who spent 2 hours talking about the superbowl or game of thrones, because they saw that with their own eyes.

A secret "hack" I've done over a decade is when the kids are playing at the playground by themselves and most of the parents are looking at twitter on their phones or reading romance novels, I have some pragprog or oreilly book either dead tree or ebook form. From the kids point of view "Dad took us to chuck e cheese" or whatever, but out of an hours time I get 15 or more minutes of serious study. I'm taking off and going to a little league game on friday afternoon/evening, and I'll pay attention while he's in the field or at bat, but when he's merely sitting on the bench waiting, rather than checking out some of the moms or staring off into space or whatever, I'll read or study something "useful". There's a lot of downtime during "family time". If we're driving somewhere to do something as a family, and my wife is driving, I'll read something.