the home office needs to get a little more dignified...

This has been a hard week for me to work from home. I'm distracted by the upcoming holidays and vacations and visitors, I'm restless without a race to be training for, and I'm exhausted from being too busy.

But I have plenty of work to do and am realizing that working from home requires a certain set of requirements. Namely, you need to have a good place to work.

My desk is in the basement, but because the basement is also the family room and the playroom, I find it hard to work there, even when the kids are at school. There isn't enough space to spread out and I know that despite my constant insistance to the kids that my desk is out of bounds for them, they still mess around in the drawers looking for scotch tape (what is it with kids and scotch tape?) and stealing pens.

So I moved upstairs, but with the view of the kitchen, I'm distracted by the dishes that need to be done. Or by the fact that the kids have allowed their backpacks to spew art, homework, and school assignments all over the table and living room. Or by the fact that it hasn't stopped raining for days and the darkness is becoming totally oppressive.

We have a little cottage in our backyard that we use for guests, but I'm thinking that the big project for the year is to turn it into an office that can also be used for a guestroom. I won't have the watercooler, but I also won't have the dishes.

Anybody have coping mechanisms for working from home?

In the meantime, check out our cute little gingerbread house made last night between dinner and homework. The kids took it very seriously, with Samuel proclaiming the annual raising of the house to be "one of his favorite parts of Chanuka-time." Hey, who says there aren't any Jewish gingerbread people? And hey, our house even has a mezuzah!