If you’re a parent in quarantine trying to juggle working from home with keeping your offspring from slowly murdering you with requests for snacks while you’re on a Zoom meeting then you’re going to love this.
Kate Danielson, a mom working from home, has created PRINTABLE signs to redirect your kids away from your office space. And you guys, these signs are relatable AF.
In the simple caption on her April 9th Facebook post, Danielson wrote,
“Please refer to the FAQ’s before you submit a question to the mom working from home.”
And below that, she left the two most beautiful Google docs every created and you can print them and use them at home, too:
This one, the color-coded caution sign warning kids about whether or not they can go into mom’s office.
Kind of like a how pissed off will mom be right now fortune teller, this color-coded sign will let kids if they can pop into the office to say hi and hang out or if they risk being set on fire from their mother.
As I type this, I’m teetering between orange and red depending on how many more times my oldest bitches about the PS4 not working right.
Moms can easily move a clip up and down the chart to show kids exactly what the mood is behind that office door.
Fingers crossed that they make good choices, especially if that clip is anywhere below the green.
But that’s not all. The icing on this brilliant mom hack is the second sign.
This one, which is the FAQ list. The FAQ list includes all of the essential questions any kid is likely to ask their mom at what is also likely to be the most inopportune timing.
Like, say, during a Zoom budget meeting while you and 18 of your colleagues are all trying to figure out how the hell the mute button works. My favorite FAQ is
“Q: What’s for dinner?
A: I don’t know yet.
Q: Why?
A: Coronavirus.”
The post is striking a chord with moms working at home.
The post has attracted more than 200 comments, which are mostly moms LOLing and tagging their mom friends (hey, gotta spread the word on this genius tactic to get shit done!)
But the number one comment outside of tags come from moms like me with kids too young to read. For those moms, I recommend pasting cartoon pictures of green, yellow, and red lights.
One mom commented,
“Hahaha! I absolutely love this! But I’d like to add, for the sake of getting my pitty party started, that some of us have kids in the house who CAN’T read. We are not ok!”
In response, Danielson commented, “I feel ya. Michael is not a great reader and I heard him talking to Zach outside my door, ‘dad? What does yellow mean again?’”
Later in the comments, Danielson added a bit of caution for those attempting to use her new system. She wrote, “Use caution when setting your clip on the green circle.”
Kudos to this smart mama who is rocking the work-from-home situation with grace and humor. As trying as these times are, it’s moms like Danielson that are making all of us laugh and feel seen.
Please refer to the FAQ’s before you submit a question to the mom working from home.Edit: Here are public printable…
Posted by Kate VanDusen Danielson on Thursday, April 9, 2020