Life Transitions

My "stay-at-home mom" career lasted a total of 3 weeks. This Tuesday I am starting a 3-month contract as an intern. While I am extremely excited about taking this position, I am overwhelmed by changes in my life and the thought of being away from baby boy full-time.

In order to mitigate the anxiety and the stress of huge life changes I have chosen to do a few things to organize ourselves:

1. I bought ALL the snacks at Costco.

One of the things I notice as I start new positions is that I eat way more food. This is always surprising to me since being a student I was home a lot, but for some reason sitting at a desk, working and using my brain in a different way I find myself famished and snacky. So I bought hummus, vegetable stick chips, and when I went to the granola bar aisle I couldn't bring myself to purchase granola bars... because my homemade ones are so much tastier.

2. I planned out ALL the meals.

I have been doing this for a while now, planning out the meals for the entire month ahead of time. It works fairly well and it is a budget saver. But this change allows little room for mind-changing, but I have developed it so that we have most of our "easy" meals at the beginning so we have the time to transition easily. Our "easy" meals consist of crockpot meals, premade shepherds pie meals, BBQ ideas, and so on. Next week we have: pulled pork (crockpot), eating at my parents (wahoo!), shepherd's pie (frozen), and pizza night (we'll order in). While I know that to an extent we substitute the "freshness" for ease, these meals (aside from the pizza!) are relatively healthy still, and should make great leftovers!

3. I pre-visited the new daycare for 30 minutes.

This one isn't innovation in any way. Because babe is starting a new daycare (so close to home!) we spent just under an hour hanging out in his new classroom last week. While I know from intuition and experience that dropping him off and leaving him for eight hours will be tough, I take comfort in knowing that within ten minutes of our visit he was off exploring the room and hanging out with the other kiddos.

4. I made a list of the reasons why I was taking the job.

Taking this position was not an easy thing to do. I had it in my mind that we were going to stay at home this summer and enjoy the "maternity leave" that I never took. While I am not resentful of these choices, I am sad that I am missing out on the best months (we live in a winter city and warm summer days and spray parks are few and far between). Both options of taking the job were tough: neither one was right nor wrong, each choice had its own merits and disadvantages, but overall we decided that taking the term position was worthwhile in the bigger picture of my career, our financials, and our goals. There will be hard days, anyone who says otherwise is just wrong, but there will be great days too.

While I am at peace with my decision, I am working hard to remember what it is like starting a new position, and remember how I have dealt with it in the past. Though we have the new challenge of a toddler in the mix. We will see how this all goes...