Some of you might know that I’ve been a Certified Scrum Master for several years. Being passionate about agile techniques has its own benefits in my professional work, but also in my everyday life.
Sure, we don’t live our family life in sprints, and don’t start our days with stand-up meetings. But we definitely have some nice challenges that we solve by using agility:
I am a working mom and usually travel a lot, about one week per month on average. Sometimes it’s less, but sometimes it’s as much as three weeks a month.
My husband also travels for work, although not that much as I do. His trips are usually shorter, one or two days.
Our 4th-grade son does Judo twice a week and has private English classes after school (and learns German in the school).
Our 1st-grade daughter dances three times a week and also has private English classes.
Our youngest is a newborn baby.
The kids’ after-school activities keep us busy every afternoon of every week, Monday to Friday
We definitely have as much family time together as we can. We also manage to have “Mommy-days”, or at least “Mommy-afternoons” several times each month. These are the days/afternoons when we have some fun together, sometimes with both the kids, sometimes only one of them.
Additionally, our daughter’s dance rehearsals and recitals are usually at weekends, several times a year. And sure thing, we have a baby boy who has his own needs and schedule every day.
And of course, we also have unexpected things happening, like a crazy traffic jam or a sick child.
Many people ask how we manage to juggle our schedule to meet all our needs.
Well, I have to say it’s not easy. I would say it’s a very nice challenge. But we love solving challenges, don’t we? ;-)
Tackling the challenge needs dedication. Doing Judo, dance or anything else with your little ones has to be a decision made together. They have to be dedicated and you as a parent have to be dedicated, too.
For example, we did baby swimming with both of them, from 3-month old (and planning to do with our baby son, too). Not because we wanted them to be world champion swimmers, but because we think it’s healthy as well as a good fun for both parties. As they grew, it became more and more clear that swimming was not for them because of its monotony. At the age of four (!) our son got to the point of saying no-more-swim. We looked around for other options and in the end, he tried soccer and judo. Actually, he did swimming, soccer AND judo for two months in parallel, but got an ultimatum from us: he had to decide, by his birthday, which one he wanted to keep doing. On his fourth birthday, he announced his decision was judo — and he still does it and loves it.
Our daughter has a similar story — she was swimming then started rhythmic gymnastics, but it turned out not to be her thing, mostly because of the trainers in the group. We were already looking around for other options when she announced she wanted to join a friend’s dance class. We checked it out and let her try. She’s still there, and more passionate than ever.
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