Return to the real world!

Ah ,the end of vacation looms on my horizon. Tomorrow I will rise at my usual 5:45 a.m. (I've been sleeping till nearly 7 a.m.!) and the work week will begin. I am lucky. I work only 3 miles from home (though pathetically enough it can sometimes take 12 minutes of drive time) so my mornings are more leisurely than folks who deal with much longer commutes. My wife and I have 15 minutes of time just for us with tea and toast. Then I email my mom who if she doesn't hear from me twice a day thinks a giant sinkhole has formed underneath our home and sucked us down into who knows where. Seriously, she gets weird about it. Kirsty used to think I was exaggerating when I said I had to email her twice a day at her prescribed times or she wigged out. I skippped one morning just to prove my point. She called the house while I was at work to see what was wrong! Kirsty hasn't complained since! (laughing)

Then the kids will get up and it will be breakfasts and Rob's homeschooling. I do two classes with him and then I leave for work. Sort of simultaneously while I am teaching, I am doing breakfast dishes and making my lunch and Chet's. If one doesn't make lunch for Chet he doesn't eat. Then he passes out from low blood sugar. It is all part of the autism and not being able to hear his body signals.

I have had such a truly wonderful vacation. I have been off of work since 1 p.m. on December 24th. That is a long stretch and also only uses 3 actual vacation days because of the way our company did the holidays this year. More typically I take a lot of 3 days weekends which allow us a lot of fun a family but which don't really allow the decompression time that this longer spell away from the office has given me. The last time I was away this long was 2 years ago when we went to Chicago to bring home Elisabeth. While that was exciting and wonderful, restful wouldn't be part of that description!

I know January is going to be stressful at work. We are having an inspection the 21st of January that usually happens in March. There are files to get ready and many many reports to create for this. One would think I would be ready for the task having had so much down time.

And I suppose I am. I know I will be when I walk through the door tomorrow. But right now I don't feel ready to be done with vacation. With so much time with the kids. Crafts and games and walks and time to just be. It has been a blessing.

We have also been lucky in that the factory that we do piece work for has closed early both these weeks due to the holidays as well. So I have been having evenings with no work as well. That very rarely happens. Once the kids are in bed I am usually packing product for the factory. The advantage to that job is that Kirsty and I can be together. One or both of us are available to the kids all the time--I typically have many breaks for story times, bath times etc. That wouldn't be an option if I had a regular part time job. But it has been nice to pretend for a few days that I didn't have to do that. Obviously it wouldn't be cool if this hiatus of the second job lasted long. But to have the gift of time to scrapbook for all the kid's books. To read an adult book for pleasure. (House Rules by Mike Lawson) To curl up on the couch and watch the football game with the boys in HD. Yup, we have an HD TV in our living room and I almost never watch anything on it. If I see tv it is in the work room when we are packing combs. Football in HD is really cool! It has all just been so neat. I didn't go anywhere, except up to Maine for a day to bring gifts to my mom, but I feel like I've had more fun than almost any vacation I could envision. The only other contenders involve scaling a few 5000 foot mountains but I need Lissa to be a bit bigger before we get back to that!