First Week Back

Imagine me taking a deep breath before writing this. Got that image? Good.

The first week back at work has been way tougher than I ever imagined it would be. I’m not sure how things conspired to make this so tough, but tough it is. Instead of the normal balance of two kids, two dogs, homeschool, and a job. I’m trying to balance all of those with an ongoing eye problem (I haven’t mentioned that yet, have I? More blog fodder, I guess), Peyton’s recurring nasty ear infection, and Sam BURNING herself on the power supply for my laptop. The only excuse for the last one is that she’s old and she sleeps like the dead. It’s the only thing that is shaped correctly, so it has to be how she did it and my only guess is that she laid down on it and then fell asleep. It clearly hurts like heck and we have no idea how many hair follicles were permanently destroyed by this little folly, but it requires twice a day medicine plus a cream in the evenings. So, more meds. Lovely.

School is actually going reasonably well for Ben. He is mostly willing to do his work and mostly willing to try even when he feels a little overwhelmed by the skills he’s learning. His handwriting is a little scary, but you can mostly figure out what he’s saying. We’re focused almost entirely on language arts right now (reading, writing, spelling, language development). We do science twice a week, but even that is stressful if there’s too much writing involved. He is getting better though and I’m proud of how far his handwriting has come since we started working on it.

But trying to balance all of that plus Katie, plus work? It’s getting a little frantic up in here. It never helps that after I’ve put a full day in with the kids, my husband will look at me and say, they seem to want some mom time tonight. Um, yeah. I’ll get right on that. So then I don’t even start work until 9p and work until 1 am to be awakened by my darling son at 7am. And we wonder why my fuse is already short.

Part of it is trying to get back into a rhythm. Now, one could argue (and I surely would) that while they’re engrossed in the movie that they’re watching, I should be doing some work rather than writing a blog post complaining about how overwhelmed I am. But the thing is if I don’t let off a little steam right now, I’m going to explode, so blogging wins in order to help me keep my sanity.

Deep breathing. That’s what I need to do. Deep breathing. How do you cope when it all gets to be too much? I really want to know.