4Real Forums: How to fit life round dh's shifts?

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Topic: How to fit life round dh's shifts?

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LucyP
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Joined: Aug 05 2007
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Posted: July 19 2008 at 1:18pm \| IP Logged

I wonder if some of you lovely ladies can help me get my head around this.

Dh works for 24 hours at a time. He leaves one morning at 8am and gets back the next morning at 10am. Then he is off the rest of that day and all the next day before going back in again, and it rotates so he works every day of the week at some point, no "normal" weekends etc. Sometimes he works 48 hour shifts and even 72 hour shifts, depending on the other staff. He does get to sleep at work, usually not that well, but enough to be okay and not need to sleep at home.

There ARE advantages to this job and we thank God for it, but it makes a regular schedule hard to maintain. We tend to get into "hey dada's home" mode and then everything goes to pot, which would be fine except the children (and me!) really need routine. The schedule we have works BRILLIANTLY when dh is at work, but when he's home we all gravitate to him and then there's chaos emotionally as the children's anxiety spikes and we find it is dinner time and nothing ready etc etc. And come September I will be adding some purposeful home educating into the mix.

So, how do you do it if you have similar odd work patterns for your dh? Or for you? He has been doing some extra work which has been 9-5ish, and the "normal" pattern to a day of waving him bye bye, getting on with the day and then building up to a happy homecoming is so easy! It was fun to do the 1950s primping the house, washing the children's faces and putting on some scent and lipgloss for me!

Servant2theKing
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Joined: Nov 13 2005
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Posted: July 19 2008 at 5:40pm \| IP Logged

If I had your schedule, I think we would do extra scheduled work whenever dh is at his job-away-from-home...then I would focus on read alouds, family projects, chores-that-can-only-be-done-with-Dad, and some fun downtime whenever he's home. If you can look at it as having the best of both worlds and give the time that he's with all of you special value and meaning, it will seem less like he's "interfering" with your "normal schedule". Some of the best advice I read during our early homeschooling years came from a police officer who did shift work...he said they homeschooled "around" his hours and made the most of the times he was home with the family, which might have even included doing something together at really odd hours like 2 am. The beauty of the homeschooling life is that we are never locked into the rest of the world's schedule! Keep your BRILLIANT schedule going on your husband's workdays and then develop a new creative schedule that works for his homedays! If you create a different routine for each of the varying types of days you tend to have, you and your children will probably be less stressed and much more blessed by your husband's unique schedule! More families experience this dilemna than you might imagine with our 24/7 world...I doubt there are as many 9-5ers out there today as there were in the 1950s!

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