Starting "School"

You may have noticed (though I doubt you were upset!) that I never finished the Twitter Experiment series of posts. As you surely gathered from the first four days of it, I was getting pretty stressed out by it. But, as I said, "Twitter was made for man, not man for Twitter" (this philosophy works for many things, not just the Sabbath or the breast pump) so I decided to let myself off the hook and chill out about this silly technology that somehow, suddenly took over my life. I'll write a short wrap up post about days 5-7 over lunch, if I think about it.

In the meantime, Kate is now a schoolgirl. After three months with Mommy on maternity leave and two months with Daddy as a SAHD (and full-time pastor with a home office) Kate finally started day care today. Though even six months ago, I never would have thought I would be--I'm feeling okay about it.

For many years, I felt very opposed to day care for my kids. Until I started my current position two years ago, I dreamed of quitting work and being a SAHM (stay at home mom, if you didn't figure that out already) when I had kids. But, I found a career path that I love and I want to find a way to balance work and motherhood. Even until the point I returned from maternity leave, though, I was hoping to work it out to work from home some of the time. That didn't work out, and frankly, I'm glad it didn't. While working some from home during maternity leave, I often felt torn, like I wasn't paying enough attention to Kate AND wasn't being as productive as I could be on my work. Now, when I'm at work, I'm at work, and when I'm home, I'm home. That's a good thing.

Daddy's in Costa Rica right now on a mission trip, so we've got grandparents helping out this week in addition to day care. Theoretically, of course, she could stay at day care the whole time I'm at work all week, but since our normal arrangement will have Daddy picking her up in the early afternoon, it's nice to have family looking after her part of the day this week too (especially since it's her first week and including my commute, that would be a long day for her).

She's not to the point of having separation anxiety yet, so she plopped down in an Exersaucer and went to town playing happily. When another child cried at her mom's leaving, Kate started to cry too (how empathetic!) but she was easily distracted from that by watching an older baby crawl around. So, I think she'll have a great day, and I'm very thankful to have found a really great center that I can feel good about keeping my daughter.

And, because there have been way too few Kate-pics on this blog lately, here's a few of Kate and Daddy, playing in the baby pool in our backyard. (Doesn't Daddy look buff and hot?)

We miss you, Daddy!