By Thanksgiving Day, Anakin’s cold had hung on and was passed on to all of us. We were all so exhausted from trying to keep up with some kind of work schedule and quality family time that we were pooped. One thought of all of us sickies piling in the car for an hour and a half scream-fest and face a long day without naps did not look appealing to any of us. I know that our families were disappointed, but our “get up and go” had “gotten up and went”. We stayed home and snuggled up in a big Walker pile on the couch. We improvised our Thanksgiving meal with sandwich ham, a can of creamed corn, and a baked potato. Mmmm.
Mom came up on Saturday. Here in Georgia, the Saturday after Thanksgiving is a big deal. It is the annual Georgia/Georgia Tech football game. My mom had gotten the boys UGA outfits at our family baby shower, and my aunt had gotten the boys Georgia Tech sweatshirts. We are a house divided, so I dressed one baby in each outfit for the game.
Mom and I decided to feed the boys their first taste of food before the game. They ate applesauce. I had long been beefing up the formula with rice cereal, but the applesauce hit the spot. It would soon become a favorite to both boys.
While we were watching the game, Luke stuck Mom’s finger in his mouth and bit her! “Ouch!” she said surprisingly. She stuck her finger back in his mouth and felt his gums. He had just cut his first tooth. The boys had just turned four months old the week before.
The boys were starting to sit up with a little help and could cackle when we would make funny faces at them. I never imagined the hours that I would spend just making silly faces to my babies to catch a taste of those sweet smiles and hear their baby laughter. We were very stingy with our time after work. All we wanted to do was go home and love on our babies. It made the ridiculous Christmas commute in Buckhead worth it to see my babies smile at me when I picked them up at the end of the day.
The night of my company’s Christmas party was a big deal to me. I had officially reached my pre-pregnancy weight. I did not wear a sexy dress to celebrate like my mom had suggested…mom’s don’t do that! Looking back, the sexy dress would have been fun had it not been so cold that night. When our friends came to find us, I was sitting at a table by myself eating crepes. I had never met a crepe before, and now we were practically best friends. Christy asked, “Where is Kevin?” I did not look away from my new love. “I don’t know. The casino tables I think,” I mumbled through my bites. She laughed, a little puzzled, “I figured that you would be together tonight enjoying a romantic night together.” I inhaled, finishing the last bite of this cuisine fatal. “We are just so happy to have both hands free that we decided to go do our own thing.” I got up, headed back to the crepe chef for my next round with my friend, the crepe. It was a great evening for us both.
We decided that we were not going to travel on Christmas Day that year. We had always gone across town to see many family members in all of the years past, but we wanted to set the precedence in the first year that the boys would stay home and play with their toys on Christmas Day. Instead, Mom, Sidekick, and my sister came up and had lunch with us. We all had a great time playing with baby toys that the boys were not quite old enough to appreciate yet.
We had dinner with Kevin’s family the next day. I relished the tradition of our yearly picture under their Christmas tree. We have taken a picture of the two of us under Kevin’s parent’s Christmas tree every year that we had been together. A total of 12 pictures under their tree. I keep them all in a special photo album that only have these pictures in it. That year we had a picture of four of us under the tree. My how things change in just the span of one year!
January came and the boys’ development really started to pick up. Anakin and Luke both crawled for the first time within three days of each other. They were both on weekdays.
I became more aggressive with people at work. The job that I loved became the one thing that separated me from my babies. It was a big deal when I had to work late because that would mean that my babies were going to be asleep when I got home. I would go days sometimes not seeing my babies awake. This was not what I signed up for.
Things came to a head in the last week of January. The babysitter’s family had gotten a stomach virus on the week that I had a big deadline coming up. It was imperative that I had to be at work and to be there as long as necessary on the week before this deadline. I had come into work that Monday and within a few hours, the babysitter called me.
“I just want to give you a warning on what is happening here. The school just called and my son has a stomach virus. My husband is on his way to pick him up. I don’t want to expose the boys to this, but I can’t do anything from here.”
Of course, my mother instincts kicked in, “I am going to try to beat him home,” I said as I packed up my computer and as much paper work as I could hold. I hung up the phone as I walked out of the door.
I barely beat the babysitter’s son home. She was standing at the door with the bags packed for us to evacuate as soon as possible.
I spent the rest of the day balancing two newly crawling babies with a laptop and a huge stack of papers that I was trying to go through. It was clear that working at home was not an option. When I was at home, I needed to be “at home”. Present and focused on my children. It was hard enough to be present and focused on my job when I was in the office.
Kevin and I scrambled for plans for the rest of the week. I HAD to be at work. Kevin stayed home the next day. Mom did us a heavy and drove across town in the dark hours of the morning for two mornings to watch the boys. We asked a neighbor for a huge favor and she watched the boys on Friday. It was mentally exhausting for me that week to press through on my job’s deadline while worrying about how my babies were doing while I was away. Our week was capped off with an ice storm that Saturday.
Later the next week, I was called into my boss’ office. We were discussing a report that she had maintained while I was on maternity leave. The discussion got heated and my boss commented on how hard she had to work on it while I was away. This struck a nerve with me after all of the sacrifices that my entire family had made the week before so that I could do my job. It just seemed so silly at the moment. These were reports. We weren’t saving lives or influencing our community or anything. It was Excel for goodness sakes! My babies needed me and this was stupid.
I laid my pen down on my legal pad on her desk and said, “I’m done. I’m going home to my babies.” and got up and walked out of her office. (I slammed her door really hard on the way out)
I walked into my office and sat down at my desk. CRAP! I had ridden the van-pool into work that day. Not only did I have to call my husband and tell him that I had quit my job, but I had to tell him that he had to leave his job and drive an hour and a half in the rain to pick me up.
“Um, honey? Can you come pick me up….”
BLESSEDMAMA2 