Babies Make Four: Blink of an Eye

That sure was a fast 12 weeks. I feel like Christmas was just last week and I'm really not quite sure what I did with my entire maternity leave. There was a lot of cleaning house, bottle making and diaper changes. Tomorrow starts my first day back at work and my new schedule. I knew that this would happen and that we would all get a good routine down and then I'd start back to work throwing it all off again. I'm a little nervous about returning since I'll be only part time and how this will effect my work as well as our finances. We've been lucky and we've paid off all of our debt (except our house, because that's a big one) so we should be good to go with the new paycheck. It feels pretty good to have no car payment and no more student loans. I'm also nervous about if I'm going to be able to handle my workload in only 3 business days, but I know in a few weeks it'll be commonplace. It's just this week that will be an adjustment.

We've had a good run these past few weeks. Two weeks ago some icky viruses (RSV & pneumonia) were going around at Luke's daycare so I decided to keep him home with me to see if we could curtail the sickness at our house (so far, so good!) and we've had a really good time together. I'm not going to lie, there were some days that were better than others and Luke likes to press my buttons any time he can (ha!) but it was fun. Luke helped me do a chore every day, like cleaning the bathrooms or the floor and then later in the morning we would go out and do something fun. Usually it was a trip to the playground, because the weather has been so nice, but if it was cold we would do something indoors like the Chick Fil A playground or the library story time. One day, we even got to go to the firehouse to see the fire engines. Our sweet neighbor (Fireman Neil as he's now known at our house) invited Luke to come and see the trucks. We got to learn all about how the firetrucks work and even got to see the fire ladder at work. Luke had the option of going up in the bucket but it was a little intimidating so he stayed on the ground with us and just watched. It was still a lot of fun!

The afternoons we would come home and take a nice long nap and then it was time for Dillon to get home. I was only going to keep Luke home with me at the tail end of last week, but we had so much fun I just decided to keep him home with me the entire last week. So tomorrow may be hard on all fronts since Luke's going back to school, Charlie's going to my mom and dad's and I'll be at work for 8 hours. I'm hoping to keep Luke with me some on Tuesdays and Thursdays, especially when it's warmer so we can get out and go play. When summer comes around, I'm looking forward to some pool days at my mom and dad's neighborhood.

So, here we go. Into our new routine and a whole new level of busy-ness. I'm just thankful that I'll have more time to be at home with my kids and to care for my family. I'll just be glad when the heartache eases a little bit of having to leave them.

At the fire station. I took our nice camera and when we got there we realized I had left the SD card in my computer. :( Cell phone photos to the rescue!