Hello to you faithful readers out there! I hope to be able to update the blog a little more frequently as I have a little bit more time on my hands these days. I'm a little overwhelmed at the thought of trying to recap the past 4 months though, so we'll just dive right in to current happenings.
Last month, David and I made the decision for me to quit my job to stay at home with Samuel full-time. This was something that we had talked about for a while (really it is what I always thought and hoped I would be able to do), but just didn't see how it would work financially. However we kept praying about it and our small group from church was faithful to pray about it too. Well, a few unforeseen things fell into place that gave us a little more money each month, and I realized that so much of my motivation to keep working was fear of not having enough money to do the things we wanted to do. We don't just blow money left and right anyway, but we always had a small budget for gifts and travel, as well as dining out occasionally, etc, and I when I compared my desire to be at home with Sam every day to my desire to afford those things I realized that I while I did want both, I would rather have the ability to stay at home with Sam all day. I also really loved my job and the company (and people) that I worked for, and felt bad because they had invested in me and supported me, but ultimately I knew that wasn't a great reason to stay either.
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| Coworker snapped this picture as I was finishing up a few last emails. |
So as of August 19, I have been a stay at home mom! I'm not going to lie, that first week was rough. I was happy to be able to play with Sam, but his schedule was all out of whack and I was having the hardest time getting him to nap. If you haven't had a child you don't understand how stressful it can be to listen to your child cry. I think I ate 10 cookies a day, just sitting there listening to the monitor while I tried to get him to take a nap. I also wasn't extremely consistent - I'd let him cry to a certain point then go get him because I didn't think he would ever go to sleep. His night sleep started to regress as a result of his terrible naps, too. So that weekend I did some research and formulated a plan for Week 2: Nap Bootcamp. To my great relief, it worked wonderfully (after a few rough naps). If you'd like more details on what worked for us, let me know. :)
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| Week 1 of staying home... much happier when not napping! |
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| Waking up after day 3 of Nap Bootcamp. |
I feel like I haven't totally gotten into my SAHM rhythm yet, but we're getting there. We have been frequenting the farmers markets, library story and music times, public pools and neighborhood parks. The house has been getting some much-needed cleaning attention as well. And Otis is thrilled to be invited on walks and to the park across the street. One thing I was really looking forward to was being able to exercise more often. I did not exercise at ALL as a working mom, save for a walk on the weekends here and there. However, I guess my laziness is showing because I still haven't been able to really work exercise into my daily routine quite yet. Sam isn't a huge fan of the stroller these days so I feel kind of bad strapping him in when he would rather be crawling around. Tomorrow we're going to try out the childcare at the YMCA... wish me luck!
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| Sam at 6 months (end of July) |
