Summer Psychedelic

A week ago I wrote about sharing my work process with my daughter and suddenly I felt the picture I portrayed might sound too ideal. So I decided to revisit this subject.

I work from home and working during the kindergarten summer holiday is not easy. But it is not that easy during the school year either, so I use my ordinary bag of tricks to distract, share and balance. To my usual methods (I guess this is a subject to a whole series of blogposts) I added some extra summer actions to help us manage and even enjoy this period.

First, we spend some time talking about our hopes and plan for the summer. I tried to make it clear that I'm not on a break and that I have to work but never the less we are going to have a nice summer. Then I made a list of fun activities inside and outside and we arranged them together on a big monthly calendar. Having an outline and scheduling specific events, outings and activities helped us both remember our plans and embrace the need to manage it all. We are not strict on keeping the plan but it’s a good prompt. Actually our biggest challenge this summer is not managing the time but handling with the heat. I don’t remember such a hot summer; we can hardly go out besides early mornings and late afternoons. And of course all the places with the air conditioning are crowded. Even the museums are packed.

And still, some days are crazy, some days my daughter spends too much time in front of the screen, I didn’t have any time to myself all these weeks and I don’t think I had a good night sleep for ages since I try to work while she sleeps. I felt stressed most days this summer and occasionally wasn’t the nicest person in the world.

But we are fine. I did make a great progress in my work lately and we did create nice memories this summer and that is encouraging. And anyway, soon after the school year starts there is the New Year holydays and we can try to make up for the activities we planned and deserted.

Above is a pattern named Deep Summer Psychedelic I designed for the MIID summer school, it feels so right.

How about you? How is your summer? Did you have time to create and time to rest?