A week in the life: where time goes with three kids

After talking to a couple of people about what time looks at various stages of parenting, I tried to put together some numbers (perhaps with more color coding than was strictly necessary).

Jeff and I both tracked our time for two weeks in January. We’ve done this periodically over the years to track how we were balancing housework and such. He did his own writeup, mostly aimed at comparing between the two of us. I wanted to give more of a picture of where my time went, so I broke the categories down differently.

We tracked two weeks, but this was the more typical one and I got tired of formatting the data after one. This was a typical late-pandemic week for us. Our kids were 7, 5, and 7 months. Jeff and I were both working from home, and we had 40 hours of paid childcare from a nanny. 

Here’s what my week looked like (full sheet if you click through):

Notes

I used a template in 15-minute intervals from Laura Vanderkam, who is big on time tracking. 

When blocks of time were really two types of activity, like cooking dinner while watching the baby, or talking with Jeff while feeding the baby, I coded it as whichever I thought occupied most of my attention.

About a quarter of my time with kids (1.6 hours a day) was spent feeding the baby. Much of that was spent reading (the second book in the Golem and the Jinni series, a fun read!) but some is bleary middle-of-the-night time.

I was surprised at how much social time there was. Much of it was because we eat dinner with our three housemates most nights: dinner starts with everyone including the kids, but after the actual eating is done, the adults tend to stay at the table talking. I had a couple of social calls with friends and a dance class by Zoom with college classmates, and we all went to a neighbor’s outdoor birthday party despite the freezing weather.

Rotating cooking with housemates also means Jeff and I spent less time cooking than most parents do. During the week I cooked one dinner for just our family, and one house dinner for everyone. 

Jeff and I often divide up the kids, with him taking the older kids and me taking the baby. We didn’t have much time with just two of us, but spent some time hanging out talking while I fed the baby.

I got a good amount of sleep in terms of hours, but it’s broken up by feedings and time awake after feedings.

The “with kids” category ranges from relaxing (reading while nursing the baby in the evening) to tiring (settling a grumpy baby) to fun (helping the big kids make valentines for their classmates) to frustrating (responding to a child who’d jabbed her sister in the face with a marker). The big kids like to have someone around, but since they were about 2 they didn’t need as much constant supervision as the baby does.

I expect I would work somewhat longer hours if I weren’t taking care of kids, but still not as many as some harder-working EAs.

Another time sketch: Larks’ A day in the life of a parent
And a list of weekly diaries from the Corporette Moms blog.