Don’t you love it when a TV show gives you an idea for a blog post? Me too.

In this case it was the greatest TV show ever created (even though it went downhill in season 4 and beyond): Alias.

In the most recent episode (Season 4, Episode 13) that we watched (yes, we get it on Netflix, don’t get me started), one of the characters has “home-life” problems, according to the stock description. In translation: Character’s son was sick and puked on him, but he told his wife that he needed to go to work, handed screaming child to unhappy wife, and left to go save the life of his colleague in a foreign country.

But how do you juggle it?

Presumably, your significant other does not work for a black-ops division of the CIA, rather his/her job is somewhat more “normal.” It may involve a combination of office time, work-at-home time, and travel time, but when your child(ren) wake up sick and school is not an option, how do you decide who stays and who gets to go to work?

In our house, it’s tricky: my wife works from home and it’s neither convenient for her to work outside of the home, nor is it effective to work in her home-office with her sick daughter next door (even if I am the one that stays home); BUT, my job happens to allow us to work from home (even with a sick child) and I am not in the life-saving business…so who stays and who goes?

More often than not, the “mommy guilt” rears its ugly head and my wife claims that she *must* stay home, despite my pleadings that my workload is not heavy and my meetings few. Sometimes it works, but usually we end up “splitting” the day, so I go into my office in the morning, make a brief appearance, and then leave to be home for post-nap duty.

Of course, when we had a full-time nanny, all we felt was a bit of guilt telling our nanny that our daughter was sick that day - and then we ran off to our offices. But now - though we do have grandparents to help sometimes - we are the back-up and we try to manage it as best we can, trying not to fall too far behind on work, and also trying to maintain some semblance of equitability (did I just invent that word?). Overall, we try to do the opposite of what happens in “Alias” - where one deems his/her job to be more important than the other, and the subsequent exit with crying baby in the background.

There is a reason it’s a juggle, but particularly when you have a two-job household and one works from home and another one has business trips and that cough just won’t stop…

So HOW do you do it in your house?