Daycare sucks

I feel like I should be doing a better job of keeping up with this, because someday, when I am gone, my children will read this and have fond memories of their mother. I don't keep a diary or scrapbook, I haven't been working on my memoirs in my spare time; so this is probably all they will have.

Somehow, I turned 35. I have two awesome kids, a great husband and am slightly over-employed as I work two jobs. It sounds worse than it is. I stopped working full-time at Target after Owen was born, because, well, daycare is obscenely expensive and I would probably be working there just to pay for it. Fortunately for me, my father decided it was time for him to retire after 40+ years of preparing taxes. So, now I work for him with the idea that, eventually, I will take over. I do still work for Target, but only have 10 hours a week and it involves me going to Wal-Mart to compare their prices on certain items with ours. It is a pretty sweet deal since I don't actually have to work in the store (no red & khaki!) and I still get the discount. Plus, I can go whenever I want, and take the baby if I need to.

Last tax season Owen came to work with me. He was small, immobile and slept most of the day. Now, a year later he is still fairly small, but extremely mobile and not so much into that whole sleeping thing. Since the end of last tax season, I have been working in the office only one day a week and it has been extremely challenging getting anything done with a toddler rifling through your trash and pulling the books off the shelf. So we made the decision to send him to daycare, which the company is paying for so I don't have to put my whole paycheck towards that. It sucks that he is not here all the time for me to snuggle with, but, honestly, he doesn't snuggle much anymore and I would never be able to get anything done.

We eased into the transition to daycare, as much for him as for me, and it went good for the first few days. Then one day he realized what was going on and that when Mom went out the door, she wasn't coming back for a while. He sobbed and clung to my legs. I made it to the car before I lost it and had to pull the car over on the way to work so I could cry uncontrollably. Since then it has gotten a little better each time. Now, he just looks at me as I leave. He will only be there full-time until the end of tax season. I have a countdown on my desk calendar already.

I was really lucky with Miles, I was able to work nights, which meant I could stay home with him. I didn't send him to daycare until he was 3, and then it was only so he could be around other kids and i could have some quiet time. It was hard leaving my baby with someone else, but he seems to really like it there and has a good time once I leave. Still, I can't wait until April when I will get spend more than a couple of hours a day with him.

83 days.