Working from home with a high needs baby and/or while attachment parenting
I have a “high needs baby“. He wants to be held by me and only me 95% of the day, and to be within arm’s reach the other 5%. He wants to nurse a lot, all day some days, and refuses to take a bottle. So if I couldn’t do something with one hand, I couldn’t do it. And he’s heavy; my back and arms were constantly sore. I couldn’t type, I couldn’t do the housework, I couldn’t read (since I couldn’t hold a book and turn the pages with one hand)… I was pretty much glued to the couch and feeling like I was going to go braindead from lack of brain use.
Then the Balboa Sling
Most people will say that to work from home you need an office or some other way to seclude yourself from your kids, set hours that you will be uninterupted, etc. I completly dissagree with that. I homeschool, and part of the point of working from home for me is to be able to sit next to my kids and work while they work. I can stop working to explain a math problem, change a diaper, or play a game. If you seclude yourself in a home office, it’s little different than going to a “real” office in my opinion, and that’s just not what I’m aiming for in working from home.
You do have to learn to multitask, and you have to learn to quickly switch your brain from one thing to another and back to the first… but as a parent, you must learn to do these things anyway. If you’ve ever talked on the phone while changing a diaper or looked at a magazine while feeding a baby, you’ve already got the multitasking skills! If you’ve stopped reading to help a child do something and then gone back to reading, you’ve got the activity switching skills!
A common thing I hear from parents is that they “don’t have time” to learn to work from home. Everything I know about computers and the internet is self-taught using free stuf from the internet. I taught myself the skills to become A+ certified when my daughter was a baby; I never took a class or paid for training materials. I just read what I could when I could. And now with my high needs son attatched to me, I am doing the same with other certifications – it just takes a Balboa Sling
