It's been a tough few weeks in my household. First there was a proposal deadline, and hard on the heels of that, I'm about to disappear for a week for work travel.
It's hard enough managing things when I'm away for a week at a time. My husband has to pick up the slack on child care, which usually translates to taking vacation time, since day care hours generally aren't long enough for him to work a full day in between.
But what do you do if you want to go away for longer? There are institutes, schools, and fellowships of various sorts which can allow a researcher to spend months at a time at a different institution, not to mention sabbaticals. Sounds wonderful, except what happens with the kids? Since my husband can't simply up and leave his job, one or the other of us would be a single parent for the duration.
I have certainly passed up some opportunites for long-term travel such as this, precisely because of the child care issue.
So what do you do? Surely others out there have encountered this issue before. What have been your solutions? Or do I just have to wait until the kids go to college?
