Thursday, July 19, 2007

I traded my pipette for a basinett

Ok, so since I last posted there have been 3 more wall shrimp incidents, but they all occurred in that same week and Will took care of the last 3 :-* There must have been some sort of migration (the week of the centipede) and if so, I hope they were migrating further away from me! But this post won't be all about wall shrimp, one post dedicated to the subject was more than enough.

This post will be about my new job as a stay at home mom! Yes, I officially quit last week after putting it off for quite some time. My boss was very sad, and that made me sad so for the first day or so I just kinda felt down which was a surprise to me. But then I came to my senses and have been excited about it since then. I would still be on maternity leave now though, so it probably won't feel REAL until July 30th which would have been my first day back. The decision was A LOT harder than I thought it would be considering how much I didn't like my job. My boss offered to let me come back just 1 or 2 days a week with the understanding being that I would only run the metals analyses, but I KNEW that as soon as someone went on vacation it would be "Sara, you know how to do BODs, would you mind doing them just while Trish is gone?". And I, being completely incapable of saying no to anyone (I once gave my number to a Latin American construction worker in Rockville because I felt bad saying no...poor Walter) would do it, and then it would become my job, and then things would get stressful again. So I just cut the cord completely and said "no" once to avoid having to say it a bunch of times in the future.

So now here I am, at home with Emily, and I am happy as can be but not sure what to do to be GOOD at my new job. If you work at a place outside the home you tend to have bosses or coworkers who you can watch and learn from, but I don't have other moms raising kids at my house who I can watch and learn from. Sure I clean the house and play with her and take care of her, but I feel like to be a real stay at home mom I need to find a playgroup or some sort of activity for her. I looked into Gymboree, but the location in Frederick is closing in 2 weeks. I'm "...more than welcome to attend classes at the Silver Spring location" though. No thanks. A weekly 2 hour roundtrip car ride with an infant just to lay her on the floor and clap at her doesn't sound like a great idea to me, even if it does get her some social interaction. She's too young to go play on a playground yet, and I doubt she'd hold still for a storytime at the library or a bookstore, but she doesn't have any cousins (and none forthcoming in the foreseeable future) so I feel like I need to find some kids her age for her to play with. Maybe it's too early to be worrying about that but oh God, if she doesn't get social stimulation she won't join clubs or teams in high school and no ivy league school will accept her! I'm ruining her life already!

Seriously though, as a parent of a very young child, it's all on you and playmates seem to be hard to find. I know there are babies out there somewhere, I saw them at the hospital! If only she had exchanged numbers with some of the other kids in the nursery.

I also have realized that I tend to view Emily as a special circumstance when it comes to going out. By that I mean when friends go out to do something social, I tend to decline because I have a baby, the same way you would decline if you had out of town relatives staying at your house, or if you were sick. You know, special circumstances. Well I have come to a realization that Emily is now the new normal, so if I want to go out I should because I'll need to figure it out eventually. It helps that Emily has 2 grandmas and several aunts in the area who are all scrambling to take care of her as often as possible, but I just feel bad leaving her. I love being a mommy, Emily and I are buddies and she is the only person in the world other than Will who I can spend 24 hours a day with and not get sick of. However it isn't healthy to stay penned up in the house with the baby all the time, so to avoid becoming a hopeless bore I need to learn to wrangle her in public better so that I can go out and do more stuff, and I need to learn to leave her more often so that I can maintain some semblance of a social life.

Well, I was going to tell my fabulous story of having to get my new car (yes, we got a FAMILY car to hold all of Emily's stuff...a Toyota Highlander Hybrid) jump-started while it was sitting in my garage, but that's kind of a long story and this post is pretty long already. Just trust that it is hilarious, and maybe I'll tell it later :-)

-Sara