Clickety-clack, My Keyboard's Back!

Oh it is so nice to be posting using an actual keyboard instead of individually selecting each letter with a stylus. My palm pilot kept me sane these past weeks in that it allowed me to check email (without which function I feel a bit like Tom Hanks in Castaway), but the outgoing messages were few and far between given that I clocked in at a feeble 15 words/minute.

And those minutes were a bit tough to come by this week. Phew! I'd forgotten how hard working for a living is! When it comes to yours truly, "working mom" has become synonymous with "working-outside-the-home-mom." I would never want to minimize the tremendous work that my SAHM friends do, but when I am playing house, I don't do much. In fact, I don't think I could account for even half of my time for the past four months in a legitimate fashion. So it's definitely been a huge adjustment getting up every morning before 6:30 am and actually having to be somewhere. Wearing clean clothes, no less.

For those interested in the logistics, The Husband and I are staggering our work hours in order to a) keep the kids home for as much of the day as possible and b) avoid paying for after-school care. The Husband takes the "it can't be morning already, can it?!" shift and heads out the door to be at work by 6:30 am while I get the "herding bleary-eyed babies into uniforms and getting them off to school" shift and try to get to work by about 8:30. Then The Husband picks them up when school is done at 3:30 and I get home around 6:00.

Work is going really, really well. I'm overwhelmed and feel like I'm barely treading water when it comes to knowing what I'm supposed to do, but that's the first week on any job. It's an exponential learning curve as I try to get a sense of both the products and the processes. But my coworkers have been welcoming and helpful, and I can see myself fitting in there quite well. Even if they do use the serial comma.

Yesterday was our kids' Christmas program. Excuse me. "Winterfest." In this age of political correctness, the only nods to Christmas were the two trees with lights on the stage. The theme for the evening was "Fairy Tales" so there were various reenactments of well-known tales. It was fantastic - you could barely hear a word, the onstage lights were positioned so that all the children were backlit so you could only see silhouettes and no one seemed to remember what to do during scene transitions. In short, a perfect children's program.

Our children shone in their parts as a horse (The Boy) and the grandfather in Peter and the Wolf (The Girl). In fact, The Boy surprised us all by learning the song and his part having only been at the school for two weeks now. They were, of course, the cutest children there and everyone else might as well have gone home after the Grade One play. But there was a potluck after - gotta love a small private school where everyone can meet for a meal after the program!

Now that we're a two-income family, it means that all household maintenance takes place on the weekend. Add a week's worth of dishes, clothes, grocery shopping plus Christmas shopping in preparation for our trip north next week, and it'll be a busy couple of days! But I'll try to post some pictures from the last month soon - now that we've got a real life computer, anything can happen!