It's time for me to be frank.

Just as last summer brought about a lot of change in my life, this past shadow-of-a-summer did the same.
*inhale*
*exhale*

I went back to work.

Sometimes master plans don't work so good during recessions.  And seven months after making some (more) big decisions, I'm finally writing about it.

The year I spent at home full-time was unforgettable.  I was so heavily involved in the kids' school that my Little Girl was starting to ask, slightly annoyed, what I was doing there all the time.  I took better care of myself, running anywhere from 4.4 to 7.0k every other day.  I was baking a lot more.

It was wonderful.  But other things started suffering and Hubby and I decided (decided meaning several weeks of me blubbering and him listening, reasoning and being much more rational than me) that me going back to work full-time was the best thing for our family.  Fast forward seven months and this is where I'm at:  I am working a long-term temporary assignment here in Markham, where location is my main motivation and I am silently chanting I am doing this for my family every hour*.  The running thing is on hold for now, pending my next check-up - my knees have been bugging me since the late spring.  I am doing what I can to stay on top of the goings-on in the school without being a member of the school council like I was last year.  The baking and cooking thing - well perhaps I should think about a new name for my blog because the only newsworthy thing about my kitchen is that we painted it blue (woohoo blue!) last month.  I'm drying our laundry more electrically than I was before - I'll be back, my beloved hang-dryer-thingies.  The weird thing is, after 4.5 years as a Pampered Chef Consultant, I don't really miss my business.  Let me rephrase: I don't miss the busy-ness.  I do miss my peers and meeting new people everytime I went out for a Show.  And I miss the positive energy that oozed out of everything from that company.

I spent (strike that - it's still present tense; I'm still working on it) a lot of time lamenting, as we chronic over-thinkers do, over past decisions, scolding myself for not knowing better and for not knowing the exact formula for being the perfect parent.  I feel like a poster-child for the working mom's struggle.  I voluntarily left stable full-time jobs twice in favour of being home full-time with my kids and once in between I resigned after a maternity leave.  And here I am, one more time, faced with the ego-bruising mission of trying to get as good a job as I had before or hopefully better.  I can't sugar-coat it; it's frickin' tough.  But then I see that my children, who aren't so little and helpless as they used to be, are still thriving "without" me, and we're able to do things, give things without struggle, and then I don't feel so bad.