I’m two and a half weeks into my new venture as a stay-at-home dad, and if there’s one thing I’ve failed at terribly (and I’m pretty sure it is just this one thing), it’s been keeping this blog up to date. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the lack of activity to any other homebound parents out there; after all, it’s a pretty low priority relative to keeping my son both alive AND entertained. Besides, I have sacrificed much more important things recently, such as showering and/or brushing my teeth. I just forgot a couple times, OK?

Fortunately for my readers (I’ll use that term liberally and assume there are others besides my wife and mom), it’s been raining off and on today, so I found myself a little window during this fifth (or sixth?) viewing of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood to do some blogging.

[Update: That aforementioned window has closed, and my son has suggested that three minutes would be an adequate amount of time for me to wrap this up and play garbage trucks with him instead.]

The biggest challenge I’ve faced since I left my job last month is figuring out how to balance being an active, attentive father with keeping up on household chores and setting time aside each day to focus on paying work. Of course, I’d love to take that third item out of the equation, but it’s kind of a critical component of this current parenting setup. Yeah, my wife makes much better money that I ever did, but we’re nowhere near being able to live on her salary alone. Maybe it would be possible if we lived somewhere (anywhere) other than Long Island, the most expensive place to live in the United States, or maybe I’m just wrongly assuming the grass is greener somewhere on the mainland. Either way, I need to make up most of the salary I just abandoned if we want to, you know, eat and stuff.

So what’s the deal here? Am I really a stay-at-home dad, or am I a work-at-home dad? Or does it even matter? I envy those couples who can get by on one salary, but I can’t imagine they’re in the majority. If they are … well, eff those guys.

My primary income source right now is doing freelance copy editing for Digital Trends, which might make up about half of my take-home pay from my old office job. The only problem there is that I get paid per article edited, and if I don’t stay on top of the queue, the work disappears along with the money. I’ve been trying to nail down the busiest times of the day to set aside for editing, but it’s an inexact science. If I plan to take a break from playing outside and focus on work from 11 a.m. to noon, for example, I’ll wrangle my kid into the house, set him up with a drink and an activity (OK, a TV show, if we’re being honest), and find the editing queue empty or nearly empty by the time I get online.

I set up an alert on my phone to notify me when new articles come in for editing. You know when it’s going off every few seconds? Right when we go back outside, or better yet, when we’re at the store, or at the pool, or with my wife as she’s getting an ultrasound.

My son has been pretty cooperative with my attempts to do work so far, but that doesn’t make it a whole lot easier. That’s where the guilt comes in. If I can give myself a half hour of working time, at least 15 minutes of it will include whining, moping, and incessant questions/comments like:

“Daddy, why do you have to do work?”

“Daddy, I don’t like when you do work.”

“Daddy, when can we play baseball again?”

“Daddy, how many minutes until you’re done with your work?”

“Daddy, how many minutes until we can play baseball again?”

“But how many minutes though?”

This I can deal with. Four and a half years of child rearing has taught me to tune out plenty of repetitive phrases like those. It’s the moping that gets to me, especially when it’s grounded in real disappointment. That look on his face when he wants nothing but his father’s attention, and his father’s got his nose in a laptop, or he’s checking his phone … again. I do understand where he’s coming from, of course — It’s summer, I get to spend all day at home with Daddy, so why doesn’t he want to play with me?

The only way I can think of to explain it to him is to introduce in some basic way the miserable concept of money, something I would’ve preferred to keep from him for as long as possible, being that it’s been my No. 1 source of anxiety since even before I decided to pass on biweekly paychecks. Money: The reason Mommy’s at work and Daddy’s ignoring you.

OK, so maybe it’s not that bad. My son is my best buddy, and we do lots of stuff together. I’ve been throwing batting practice for hours out of every day (whiffle balls hurt, by the way). Over the last two weeks we’ve taken walks, gone to the beach and the pool, explored Costco and Trader Joe’s, laughed at a lot of stupid stuff and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” more times than I can count.

I’ve also been doing work for pretty much every minute since he went to bed. I started this blog post roughly nine hours ago. And now you know why there’s been so few updates.

I’d love to hear from the other stay-at-home moms and dads out there. How do you balance work and play? Share your tips and tricks in the comments.