Reply to What is daily life like with 3 kids and 2 careers?

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[quote=Anonymous]We have 3 kids (10, 8 & 6) and 2 FT jobs. HHI is ~$400K & both jobs are flexible in their own ways, but involve 50ish hours a week (about 2/3rds outside the home). We have an au pair & the kids' DCPS ES is easy walking distance. We handle to morning logistics so that our au pair can sleep in & resents our night/weekend requests less. She works for 30 minutes-1 hour after we get home so that we can do one-on-one time with each of the kids.

Kids' activities are coordinated to the extent possible & no one plays a travel sport (only 1 might eventually head in that direction & we will attempt to dissaude/delay as long as possible). They also do as many of their activities as school as possible & we're lucky in terms of what their school offers on that front. I would say that our kids do more than an average number of activities though, just because they enjoy them.

Our friends see a lot of their friends, but I still curate as much as possible. Playdates/hang outs with our friends & their kids or with families who have 2 kids that line up with ours. Our 9 year old is the tension point on this, obviously, but luckily she has friends who are willing to have her to their house & pick her up/drop her off if that's what we need to make it work. (DH works on the weekend a fair amount, so we have logistics issues.) We reciprocate but it's like 1 at ours for 2 elsewhere; we try to balance it by having ours be more involved adventures that we can plan in advance/include multiple kids' friends in.

My "spare" time is spent being very involved in my kids' school so that my "hobby" overlaps with seeing them/making school better for them. I am very type A/good at running events, so this works for me. Also, it means I have made lots of good friends in the kids' school community, which helps us have a solid village in place. We don't have any grandparent help at all (they are mostly very far away & the closest aren't healthy enough to really help anyway), so the village is important.

We do travel, but there's more driving to a rental house 3-4 hours away than would be my ideal. It's getting easier now that the kids are older to do more than that... but obviously quite expensive. We do take one big international trip a year. Also, both DH & I travel for work a few times a year, so sometimes that scratches the itch. Both of us will tack on a day or two if the trip is to somewhere cool; no guilt from the other attached. We just started taking the older kids on 1-on-1 local city weekend trips once/year and it was a good introduction.[/quote]

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