Most of the time, I like my job. But there are some weeks that really make me question the whole idea of working full-time with a toddler. The work-life balance is precarious at the best of times, and when he’s sick, those scales really have to tip toward home, which makes it very hard to be as responsive as I would like to be at work. Which then makes me feel guilty because I would like to think about nothing except making Jack feel better when he’s feeling bad. It’s a vicious cycle.
On Superbowl Sunday Jack woke up from his nap with a fever, and he was feeling pretty terrible. That kid is usually a mile-a-minute, running around the house, can’t even sit still to Skype kind of a child. But when he’s sick, he really slooooows down. It’s about the only time that I get to snuggle with him, so I actually will just soak that up and hold him as much as possible. But anyway, back to the week…
Since we were leaving on Saturday for a week of vacation, I knew it was going to be a super-busy week at work. It always is before you go away – because I just don’t want to come back to a to-do list that I could have gotten out of the way ahead of time. But Jack’s cold had different plans. On Sunday night John and I sat down with our respective calendars and looked at what meetings we absolutely HAD to be at, and worked out a plan for trading Jack duty for Monday. That afternoon while I was watching Jack he decided he wasn’t going to to sleep unless I was holding him, so we had a little naptime together. Monday night he still wasn’t feeling better, so we pulled out our calendars for Tuesday. And on Tuesday night we did the same thing, because he still wasn’t back to normal. On Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, his fever broke and he decided he wanted to eat and play for the first time in 3 days, which was a great thing, but unfortunately it happened at 1 in the morning! So we spent some quality time together when I would have preferred to be sleeping. Thankfully he had a great day at home on Wednesday, and we all had a solid night of sleep that night, so Thursday life was back to normal. But what a rough week, and every time I felt sorry for myself I would just remind myself that Jack was fina probably feeling even worse. I am so glad that he’s back to 100% finally!
Caroline's Corner 