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"  This was my summer. All day \u2014 every day. As you may have noticed my blogging was a bit sporadic over the summer. The reason was simple: For the first time since they were babies, I had BOTH my children home with me ALL DAY. Now in the olden days when my kids were very young, I would take them out at nine a.m. and run them around the neighborhood until about noon, then I&amp;#039;d bring them home, feed them, and put them down for a three-hour nap. I would write during nap time. It was great system. Once my kids grew out of the napping stage it was an adjustment, but my son was going to pre-school five days a week in the morning. I would sneak in some writing while he was at school and my daughter was still groggy. It wasn&amp;#039;t a perfect system, but it was good enough.  Then, this summer hit, and I was totally unprepared for the chaos of having both my kids home with me all day without a break. I got nothing done \u2014 and when I say I got nothing done, I can&amp;#039;t stress to you how much nothing I got done this summer. If a bear had been sitting on my chest all summer, I might have accomplished more and had more alone time.  Normally, I would use this opportunity to make helpful suggestions about how to sneak in &amp;quot;Me Time&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Productivity Time&amp;quot; when you&amp;#039;re on full-time parent duty for an extended period of time and you have a part-time job or other responsibilities like breathing and eating. Sadly, I don&amp;#039;t have any of those handy tips, so I&amp;#039;ll just offer up a few coping techniques that I thought were important to my survival.  1. Don&amp;#039;t let your little bundles of joy see how much they&amp;#039;ve drained from you. Seriously, if you have some sort of deadline and there are two children standing in your &amp;quot;home office,&amp;quot; and they just keep screaming for you to settle some abstract dispute that&amp;#039;s erupted over Star Wars: The Mother-F%^*ING Clone Wars, and their fight is entering its third consecutive hour, DON&amp;#039;T LET THEM SEE YOU CRY. They are like emotional buzzards, and once they see that you&amp;#039;ve collapsed, they will swoop down to feast on your salty tears.  2. &amp;quot;Home Office&amp;quot; is a lie. If you plan to do any sort of part time work \u2014 whether it&amp;#039;s writing for a women&amp;#039;s magazine, blogging, selling Mary Kay, or cooking crystal meth \u2014 you need to do it off the premises in some sort of childproof bunker. A child looks at your &amp;quot;Home Office&amp;quot; and sees a tiny gymnasium equipped with a printer and &amp;quot;spinny&amp;quot; chair. The only time a Home Office is a real thing is when you don&amp;#039;t have children. 3. Don&amp;#039;t start smoking again. If you start smoking again, the children win. 4. Give up. Just admit that you&amp;#039;re not getting any good work done and take the kids to the park or the pool. Sure, you will have a gnawing feeling in your belly that you will be fired, your deadlines will be missed, and you&amp;#039;ll turn in incoherent ramblings about all the things your children are stealing from you: time, energy, youth, freedom, creativity, etc., which will be especially troublesome since you were assigned a story about women&amp;#039;s summer fashions. At least the kids are outside burning all their energy so maybe (just maybe) they will go to sleep before eight p.m., and at least they&amp;#039;ve stopped screaming at each other about Master Yoda&amp;#039;s relationship with someone named Plo Kloon.   5. All this frustration won&amp;#039;t help in the end. The memory of the chaos and stress they created for you during the summer will magically vanish when your oldest kid puts on his school uniform and marches off to his first day of kindergarten. You&amp;#039;ll be a total mess. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/mens-perspective/a14421/stay-at-home-dad-summer/>