it’s been a busy few weeks of adjusting to our new schedule with me back to work three days a week.  for now, we’re doing childcare sharing with two families and J is able to stay home two mornings, but that will change in the next few months and we’ll have to adjust again, so i’m trying to just enjoy each day as it comes.

my first week back at work was more difficult than i’d expected for me.  I mean, I’d already been back two mornings a week for the past 6 weeks, what was the big deal, right?  But 3 full days in a row of not seeing my baby and I found that I’d come home just missing him like crazy.  The good thing about that was that I then spent the rest of his awake hours just talking to him and singing with him and playing with him until it was time for him to go to bed and i finally, intrinsically understand the push-pull feelings of working parents.  when i’m home with him all day, i don’t tend to focus on him exclusively.  There’s laundry to be done and dishes to be washed and other people’s kids to take care of (see childcare sharing note in first sentence) and, well, it’s good for a baby to learn to be content entertaining himself for short periods of time right?  But he doesn’t get the intense one-on-one interaction all day long.  I think they sort of balance out.  Don’t they?  In the end, I think the only thing that I’m really missing out on by working is time to exercise.  When I get home from work, I want to spend all of my time with baby dude until he falls asleep.  Maybe I’ll have to take up a night-running habit.  Not to say that it’s not difficult to miss out on the little bits of my boy’s day, but I think it would also be hard for me to not get the fulfillment (and, let’s be honest, the break from someone needing my care all the time) that i get from my job.  i know this is not a new struggle.  i know my ideas are in no way new or novel ideas, but this is the first time I’ve experienced them from the inside.  It makes me wish (once again) that we lived in one of those countries where women get 1 year maternity leave.  Oh, Canada…