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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

I wish I had time for any of that. I keep reading ideas for how to deal with the boredom of self-isolation, but nobody writes about the stress. My wife and I have to homeschool two kids while also doing our own jobs from home. We're lucky of course that we have jobs, and we can do them from home, and we have two awesome and healthy kids. But homeschooling while we work really is a bit much.

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A quote I've seen doing the rounds lately is salient here:

"You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work."

I’m right there with you. I get so irritated seeing stuff like this because I wish I could use my time to get ahead but we are just trying to stay afloat. At least we got our health which is what really matters.

can’t upvote enough, 5mo old and a 2yr old here and it’s.......a lot.

My wife and I are trying to manage a 6 year old and 3 year old and the original comment made me try to imagine what the theoretical hardest age to try to work from home with would be. 5mo and 2yr is roughly what I came up with in my head.

Not that it helps much, but you have my sympathy. If it feels like it's really, really hard, stressful, and frustrating it's because it is. And that's okay.

My wife and I have ~10 month old twins here. No help in the house these past weeks and my wife and I are both still working (full-time, if anything the volume of work has increased instead of decreased) remotely. Adding another layer of complexity to the situation, she's pumping for both of them and we're both stressed out about keeping her supply up through this ordeal (which means we need to continue eating healthy and staying stress free... yeah, right).

It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.

Our twins are turning four in a couple weeks. I can't imagine being in that first year during this time. It felt like we were drowning, and that was just "normal" twins (plus a 5 year old).

My only unsolicited advice (because unsolicited advice is obligatory on the internet) is to cut yourselves a whole lot of slack. A lot of stuff we worry about as parents means very little in the grand scheme of things. Don't add any extra stress you don't need. Take any and all "shortcuts".

> A lot of stuff we worry about as parents means very little I can second this. Some stuff we are told means very little as well.

I have a 3 year old and a 3 month old. My wife does not work (quit her retail job to have our second) so my situation is different. That being said, making sure everyone is eating and sleeping as much/well as possible takes everything we have.

My feelings really go out to you. Hope you all come through healthy and caring for each other. Meanwhile, it's even tougher for people with kids at home who still have to go to work. Not all of us are lucky enough to be able to work with zoom and github.

In my country, only people with "vital" jobs, which means health care, police, emergency services, everything related to food (production, delivery), logistics, garbage collection, etc. still go out to work, and for them, child care is still available. Home workers have to handle their own children.

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