Friday, December 20, 2013

Theory of difficulty - 1

Dear Arjun and Anirudh,

Have I ever told you how difficult it is to manage you both? Probably not. I was often told by people that we are doing a great job of coping with you and our work. I just smile to them, without starting with my long story. I am sure you are willing to hear the story of our daily routine atleast once. You can decide for yourself later whether it is a tough task or not.

Ashwini gets up at 6:30 in the morning, prepares the breakfast and leaves to her office at 7:30AM. I get up quite late between 8:00-9:30. It is a complex algorithm depending upon too many factors which even I don't understand properly. Then I get ready for office which only takes half an hour. Since I have to drop you to child minder on my way to office, I need to get both of you ready for that. That involves a series of sub tasks like brushing, searching for dresses, changing nappies, putting two three layers of clothes etc. It also used to involve giving the breakfast which I managed to offload to your child minder. Occasionally I end up sharing my breakfast with you as it is difficult for me to get ready when you are awake. Then I drop you to child minder on my way to office. When the weather is not friendly, taking you till the car itself is a pain. The moment I drop your hand, I invite all sorts of problems.

For us office is the place for relaxing. It doesn't mean that we don't do any work at office. It is much easier compared to our struggle at home. Since we have to pay our child minder on hourly basis, I only spend around 7 hours at office. I have successfully convinced my manager that I work very hard after going home as well by sending mails late night. So leaving office early was never a problem for me. Then I pickup you both and return back to home between 6:00-6:30PM. After that I start preparing for the dinner. Since you don't allow me to do anything, I also need to make sure that there is a constant supply of snacks to keep you occupied. Ashwini will come back home at around 7:30 and then takeover the kitchen responsibility, while I take care of you. By the time your food is ready it will be 8:00PM. Then she will start feeding you which will take around 30 minutes to one hour depending on your mood. Meanwhile I take some rest locking myself to the laptop for 30 minutes. Then I take bath and prepare things ready for your bath. You will be ready for the bath by that time and I give bath to one of you. Ashwini will clean the mess you created during dinner and give bath to another when I am done. After your bath she will take bath while I play with you for 10-20 minutes. You will be ready to sleep at around 9:30 and it is my task to make you sleep. That is another nightmare task which takes around 1 hour. Meanwhile Ashwini will complete the kitchen duty for our dinner. When you are fast asleep it will be around 10:30 to 11:00. That is when we get our complete freedom back! Ashwini will get a solid 1 hour break and I get 2 before we go to bed. Ofcourse we have to do some office work as well in that time, but we are not allowed to count that as work!

Friday is a special day as we both work from home to save some money from child minder. Working from home and managing you both is nothing short of any adventure. The routine remains the same, except that Ashwini will have to take the extra responsibility of giving you both breakfast and lunch. Her office is more demanding compared to mine so she needs to take more calls while working from home. During calls, only one of us can work(or pretend to work). Luckily putting you to sleep in the afternoon is much easier, so we get a good 2 hours of time to work peacefully!

The weekends aren't any less challenging. In fact we prefer weekdays to weekends in most of the days. We don't have to do office work, but there will be loads of other work like shopping, grocery shopping, cleaning etc. Managing time for all these is definitely tougher than doing the regular office work!

All these are assuming things are going normal. But things will seldom be normal. Every week you will attract some kind of bug and disrupt our schedule completely. Most of the time one of you will catch the bug, play with it for a week and then pass it to the next one. Everything will take double the effort when you are down with those bugs. Our schedule will be updated with frequent visits to GP and hospital . We don't get free sick leave for your illness, so it is a bigger problem on week days. In addition to the work, it is also a problem for the sleep. If you don't sleep peacefully, we can't think of sleeping either. When you are sick you throw up more than what you take in. In addition to cleaning that, we will also end up changing a lot of clothes with a big pile for washing! The medicines also needs to be given in time so we end up keeping the alarm for odd hours. Most of the time we keep doing that for 10-15 days in a row!

Some people were saying earlier that having twins is a problem only at the beginning. As they grow older, they will play together paying back the time that they have taken earlier. We are waiting for that day eagerly, since a long time. I am not really sure whether that day will come any time sooner. You guys like to fight with each other more than you want to play with each other. No matter how many different toys you were given, you always want the one in others hand! More often it turns physical with one you hurting the other badly. None of the solutions in the internet works when it come to these matters. However we do see one of you playing in your own world sometimes. Unfortunately that often happens when the other one is down with fever! 

So what do you think about our daily routine? Is it really a difficult job? You don't have to tell me. Your answer doesn't matter. May be it looks difficult in the eyes of some people. May be it looks monotonous to some people. But I don't think it is a difficult job. There were definitely times when I had lost my control yelling at you. There were definitely times when we felt it was too difficult to continue with that kind of routine. There were definitely times when it all looked too monotonous. But I can assure you that all those were momentary times. I never really complained to anyone saying it is a difficult job. I couldn't complain because I didn't have the right to complain...

1 comment:

Sriram said...

With just 15 days since Smera is with us, I often keep thinking how Satty and Ash managed the double trouble. I can totally understand what you have been going through and the best I can do is to give you a big E-Jadoo ki Jhappee.