The end of a long first week

As the end of week one ticks to a close, all I can say is it hasn’t been too bad, but I’m sure glad it’s the weekend. Honestly, I’ve forgotten how long a week actually is.

Monday was surreal – as I said, I felt like a deer caught in headlights. The day went by painfully slow as I had nothing to do, which made me wonder what exactly I was doing here. And everyone treated me like I had just come out of a coma or something – like I needed special care and couldn’t handle more than one thought at a time.

The rest of the week got better, as I now have some projects on the go and many more meetings lined up to bring me up to speed on other things. As I’m the lead writer for most provincial publications, and my replacement quit (actually my replacement’s replacement, but we don’t need to get into that) six months ago, people are pretty happy to see me and know that I’m back. (This makes me feel pretty good, actually!)

Driving in instead of TTCing like I used to is actually not as bad as I thought it would be. I loved taking the TTC to work – the 45 minutes to myself when I could sit and read at the end of the day was exactly what I needed – but now, with the new morning routine, it makes more sense for me to drive. I could’ve done without the freak rush-hour-only snowstorm yesterday though. My 14 kilometre drive took one hour and 20 mintues!

It’s taking awhile to adjust to the new routine at home, but I’ll get the hang of it. In the mornings, Ryan heads to work super-early and then I get myself up and dressed before Austin wakes up. Once he’s up, I get him dressed and fed and, if all goes well, the two of us are out the door by 8 a.m. So far it’s gone well, so well in fact that on two of the last five days, I’ve had to wake Austin up just before 7:30 a.m.

The hardest part is now, when I pull up at Austin’s daycare house, he’s on to me. The first two mornings he was fine with the whole thing – easily going into his babysitter’s arms. On the third and fourth day, he went into her arms but squirmed around to reach back at me and started whining. This morning, he actually gripped me tighter as I walked up her steps and started to whine before I even opened the door.

I know he’s fine as soon as I drive off – in fact I know he’s fine before I even get back to the car because she opened the door this morning to show me that he had calmed down within 10 seconds – but it still makes me feel like crap and is a really crummy way to start off your day. Now I know why some mom’s here at work say they always do the drop off with their husband or their husband does it alone. It’s really hard to walk away from Austin when he’s upset, because all I want to do is pick him up and hug him.

I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to the weekend as much as I’m looking forward to it today. I get to spend all day with Austin – well, I have to share him with the 22 other people showing up at my house on Saturday for his first birthday party.