Winter is here.

Snow is piling up across Europe and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Slippery roads, canceled flights, stuck trains. The perfect movie-like version of parenthood? Building two-meter-high snowmen with our kids, screaming as they ride down hills on sleds while scarves flap in the wind, snowball fights everywhere.

Reality, however, looks a bit different. The thing we are most afraid of is the board at the kindergarten entrance. During this season, kids do not collect and trade Pokémon cards. They collect and trade illnesses.

A short summary from the board in our youngest child’s group during the last two weeks before Christmas: stomach flu (several cases), hand-foot-mouth disease (several cases), scarlet fever (once, yaaay), COVID (a looooot).

The panic sets in and questions start popping up in our heads: How do you, without sounding like a terrible person and scaring them for life, tell your kid that maybe they shouldn’t hug and wrestle Paul, whose entire shirt and face are covered in neon-green snot?

The domino effect.

Of course, it never stops at just one kid. The stomach flu comes home on Monday. By Wednesday, the sibling has it. By Friday, one parent is down. By Sunday, the other one follows. And then, in some cruel joke of nature, the original patient — the one who started it all — is fully recovered and bouncing off the walls at six in the morning, demanding pancakes, while two adults lie on the couch questioning every life choice that led them here. The whole household falls like dominoes, stretched across two or three weeks, and you never quite remember what it feels like to have everyone healthy at the same time.

The false hope.

And just when you think it is over — the nose is dry, the fever is gone, the energy is back — you send them to kindergarten again. You sit down at your desk. You open your laptop. You take a deep breath. Freedom. Then your phone rings at 10am. "Could you please come pick up your child?" Back to square one. The cruelest part is that brief window of hope. You had already mentally rescheduled your week. You had told your team you would be back. You had believed it was over.

The guilt.

How do you deal with the fallout when the kids get sick? And we know it is not IF, it is WHEN. How do you burn down carefully planned schedules and time-boxed calendars your team agreed on weeks ago? How do you tell your team that a deadline that once seemed very achievable might now be a stretch, because your other team, this small human needs us right now.

And it is not just the logistics. It is the guilt — and it comes from both sides. When you call in sick for your kid, you feel it toward your team. The standup you are missing. The pull request no one will review. The sprint goal slipping. But when you do sneak in a quick Slack message while your kid is watching Bluey with a fever on the couch, the guilt flips. You are right here, but you are not really here. Your kid asks you something, and you say "one second" for the third time, and you see it in their face. You cannot win. You are always letting someone down, and somehow it is always yourself too.

You are not alone.

Starting in November, we hear dozens of stories like this from parents. Some are even painfully funny. Others create an instant sense of solidarity. Sometimes you even hear a genuinely helpful idea about how to cope with all of this. All of them weirdly make us feel better, as we know we are not alone in this.

So what is your story? How do you cope? We'd love to hear from you.

Marcin && Ola