How do you manage work during the school holidays?

Let me start by saying I don't have a good answer for this question! One of the main ideas of running your own business is to have the flexibility of being around for the children. In some industries it may be possible to not take on any work over the holidays and therefore resolve the problem. Inevitably that means doing extra work before and after the holidays.

Some families manage to continue their childcare arrangements during the holidays by keeping children in nursery or by enlisting the help of grandparents. This is a good solution if it means that you can get a few hours work done here and there.

In my case I have one child at school, one in pre-school 3 mornings a week and an 18 month old who is always at home. So during the school holidays all 3 children are at home. I have not yet managed to find an ideal way to manage both my business and childcare so we just make the best of it. Luckily my business (selling maternity and baby clothes online) means that I don't have a set amount of work each day. I need to dispatch parcels on a daily basis but that can take anywhere from 20 mins to 1 hour to pack plus a couple of visits to the post office. If that is all I do then we can easily manage days out and have tons of fun together. There are plenty of other tasks that I need to be getting on with (preparing the end of year accounts, ordering stock, preparing stock to send to Amazon's warehouse, doing my VAT return...) and so I just have to figure out how and when to do those.

Some of the smaller jobs I just get on with whilst the children are playing together or even (bad mummy warning!) watching TV. I plan to get loads done in the evenings but most of the time I'm just too tired by the end of the day. Some jobs such as preparing parcels and stock my older children like to 'help' with so I let them assist with the bits they can do.

In conclusion, you probably just have to muddle through - much like the rest of the year! My feeling is that is still well worth the hassle though.