Hellobee

It has been a couple of months since I last posted here because things have been really hectic for the Starfish family. We recently purchased a house here in Lexington and have been dealing with packing and moving with two three-year-olds. It’s been an overwhelming and somewhat frustrating time in our lives.

Adding to the craziness, Mr. Starfish resigned from his job a few weeks ago for a new opportunity that started just last week. He accepted the new job within days of us closing on our house, which was really difficult because the new opportunity is not based in Lexington. Instead, it is based in St. Louis, which is about a five-hour drive from our new home. Talk about a bad commute!

I could go on and on about the rationale for Mr. Starfish taking the job, and the reasons that I can’t leave my job in Lexington, but I won’t bore you with all that. The bottom line is that this is our reality for the time being and he will have to travel a lot to make this new job work. He expects to be in St. Louis each week while he ramps up with the new company, hoping to eventually normalize the travel to every-other-week once he is settled in. This kind of travel is not entirely abnormal for Mr. Starfish and he used to travel about 2-3 times a month in his old job. Still, having him gone every weekday is not something that we have tackled with children. We have managed through near-constant travel for him in our past but that was all pre-children. I’m pretty anxious about how we’re going to handle this successfully.

We have tried to brainstorm how to make this work and in the hopes of being helpful to anyone else tackling a similar challenge, I’d like to share some of our strategies. But I would really love and appreciate any tips from others who have been down this road before!

Daily Facetime with the kids – We try to Facetime Mr. Starfish every morning while the girls are eating their breakfast. It’s a pretty good time because they are not particularly mobile while they’re eating and he gets their full attention. I have put my foot down for now against doing Facetime in the evenings because when I get home from work, we are thrown right into bedtime routine which has its own challenges and I’m not looking to add to them! But I may be more open to this as time goes on.

Daily call with each other – Separate from family Facetime, Mr. Starfish and I have learned that it’s critical that we hop on the phone nearly every night to connect and download on our days. It’s really easy to drop this priority because our days are already so hectic, but I think it’s really, really important to maintain that emotional and everyday connection.

Saturdays are “Daddy Days” – Each Saturday the girls go out to a fun morning activity and lunch with Mr. Starfish. Because they have so much one-on-one time with me during the week, it is important for them to likewise have one-on-one time with him. This also allows me to have a few hours to myself to run errands and get other tasks accomplished, something that I don’t get as much of during the week because Mr. Starfish is gone.

Calendar managed by traveling spouse – Okay, this one is more wish than reality at this point, but I am trying to push most parenting tasks that can be done behind a computer or phone to Mr. Starfish. While he can’t physically be here to help out, he can help out with things like scheduling doctor appointments, dentist appointments, coordinating with the girls’ school, managing activities, etc even while he is five hours away. Since his travel has ramped up, I’ve tried to be better at pushing those types of tasks to him but it’s harder than it should be for me to offload some of that mental load!

Nanny – It would be really difficult to manage Mr. Starfish’s travel schedule without our nanny. When the kids unexpectedly get sick and can’t go to school, she is there to stay at home with them and I can attend my own job. In a couple of weeks, the girls are starting at a new preschool and she will attend the open house and orientation with me and the girls and help me to gather all of the information that is delivered across their two new classrooms. She also will start to do our grocery shopping while the girls are in school, which is going to be really helpful to our family because it’s a task that Mr. Starfish used to do.

Family On Call – I would say that one of the hardest parts of Mr. Starfish’s travel is when I also have a work trip come up. We do not have family in Lexington but on those occasions, we have been able to plan far enough in advance to ask family to travel here and be here for the girls while we are both on the road. While this used to only happen about once a year for us, I’m worried that the frequency may increase as his travel becomes more constant. Thankfully, both my mom and Mr. Starfish’s mom have insisted that we lean on them for those challenging times.

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So those are the strategies that we’ve come up with so far. Although it feels good to have these things in place as we kick off this heavy travel period for Mr. Starfish, I remain concerned for the impact that it may have on our family and relationship dynamic. In particular, I’ve noticed that as the childcare falls more on me during the week, I am getting really set in my ways of doing things such that I get really irritated when Mr. Starfish comes home and does things differently. It’s been really hard to shift smoothly between parenting without him, and then parenting with him, and I’m hopeful that this will get easier over time and/or I find some good strategies to help manage this. Again, I would really appreciate any advice or strategies or tactics that the hive has as we embark on this new challenge!

The girls giving their daddy some snuggle love after dance class!