Tuesday, November 21, 2006

SAHM I AM

So, I've officially been a Stay At Home Mom, aka SAHM for about five months now, it's really seven if you count my maternity leave.

Do I miss working? Not really, what I'm doing now feels an awful lot like work. Do I miss getting up every morning and getting Eric off to daycare and then giving myself an asthma attack running to catch the T? Not really. Do I miss waiting for the T and getting smashed onto a train next to a guy that just got hit by the cheap cologne bus? No, not so much. Do I miss a job where a promised promotion mysteriously got dropped the minute I announced my second pregnancy? A little, but not enough to regret my decision.

I liked my job. I was good at it. But most weeks, it was a part time job that I had to be there full time for. I was pretty bored a lot of the time. But I wasn't that interested in a lot of the stuff I could have volunteered for. It was nice to go and have adult conversations that didn't require me to be building train tracks or changing diapers while I talked. I didn't have to ask the majority of my colleagues if they had to "go peeps" every twenty minutes or so. The intellectual part of my brain is starting to get a little rusty. But so far, I can't say I miss it. I felt a little twinge when a girlfriend of mine, also with two kids sent me a link to an article about how she runs an Angel Investment group. But then I decided there's plenty of time for jobs once Kaylee is in Kindergarten or at least preschool.

Eric is entering a new developmental phase of testing limits. He's refusing to go to the bathroom resulting in as many as five accidents in a single afternoon. He's sleeping longer nights and his nap is slowly, but not slowly enough going away. He can't quite fall asleep in the afternoon some days, but the consequence is that he's completely fried by around 5:00 PM, and needs to go to sleep right about the minute his dad gets home to play with him at seven. The upside is that he now sleeps until seven in the morning. Up until about two weeks ago, he had only ever slept that "late" about twice in his life and both times he had a high fever and was quite ill. But now he's regularly sleeping until seven.

That doesn't do me much good yet, because Kaylee wants to start nursing anytime from 4:00 AM 5:30 AM and wakes me up frequently between then and when she gets up, usually between 6:30 and 7:15ish. So, Eric's new sleeping schedule hasn't resulted in me getting much more sleep.

I miss sleep.

I could finish "ferberizing" Kaylee to get her to sleep through the night. But my mommy instincts tell me she's just not ready. I'll probably do it in a couple of months. But right now is not the time. I'll know when it is.

Most people I know tend to 'baby' their second child a lot, especially because for most folks, like me, it's the last one. So, we'll see how much I baby her when she's technically no longer a baby. I know that the longer I wait to get her to sleep through the night, the harder it will be. But she's so close right now... She does go a good eight to nine hours. It's just that she needs to go to bed at 7:00 PM, so that puts us at 4:00 or 5:00 AM for that first feeding.

I'll figure it out.

Eventually.

I hope.