transitions

I am counting down to September when my kids will start attending a daycare center two full days a week (and my four year old will also go to the most wonderful Waldorf-inspired Nursery School you could ever imagine an additional two mornings).

And I will have two full days open to do my work (writing, teaching, researching, designing workshops, and wherever else "following my bliss" takes me).

I have worked through a dozen permutations of work/school/daycare options and this is what feels best for us right now.

I have been processing this decision since my daughter was about 12-14 months old and I started getting urges to find substitute care so that I could focus on my work.

Right about that time I became pregnant with my son (it took us almost a year to get pregnant with our first so we decided to start trying sooner rather than later. Surprisingly! Things happened quite a bit sooner this time around and we were on our way to becoming a family of four!!)

So I put the work plans on hold and I joyfully dove back into everything pregnancy/birth/baby.

I continued to write freelance for a local parenting magazine and teach prenatal and two other yoga classes, and played "pass the toddler" with my husband and parents.

It was extremely stressful, to put it mildly.

I felt like I was unraveling at the seams...packing my daughter in the car, racing to my mom's to drop her off, zooming down to the yoga studio, out of breath and out of energy, to stand in front of a class and tell people to "just relax and breathe."

So about half-way through my second pregnancy, I gave up all but my prenatal class. And as soon as Quinn was born, I gave that up too.

I kept writing as much as I could, which wasn't much. One article a month--750 words--was all that I could handle. And some months I couldn't even handle that. There were a few months that I just had to apologize to my editor and say, "Sorry but it just isn't going to happen this month."

And things kind of worked pretty well for a while with my older in nursery school two mornings and my younger at a wonderful home daycare three mornings. (I traded childcare with a friend so every-other-Monday, while my younger was daycare, my older went to her house for a playdate, and I got some extra writing time.)

But in the last few months it's become really clear to me that two hour blocks here and there are just not enough.

I need and want more time to work.