Surviving and Thriving

It’s 5 PM and I am already sitting at our dining room table, thanks to a work-from-home day. I am encircled by a large and impressive IKEA wooden train track, and two happy boys are drawing on either side of me.

Taye’s drawing is a controlled, multi-colored composition. Each color is drawn in a different style, and each style represents a different object. The long orange zigzag is a slide. The small green swirl is a swing, as is the purple line, connected at either end by solid ovals. The yellow and pink circles are circles. He tells me this with a look that says, “Momma, you should know that!”.

Dash’s drawing started with small, faint circles, then exploded into a mono-chromatic swirl that engulfed the page. He says it’s, “Mommy, Daddy, Dash, Taye, Portsie, Lucy, Duncan, America.”

This is still a favorite topic.

I love how their drawings reflect their personalities, and the things that are on their minds. I love that my job allows me to work from home sometimes so that I don't have to miss this stuff.

I have been back at work for almost six weeks now. The first couple weeks were pretty hard emotionally for all of us but here we are, six weeks later, and I can honestly say that not only are we going to survive this change, but in spite of it we continue to grow happier and happier as a family. I attribute this to five things;

1) my amazing husband who has become an incredible stay-at-home dad

2) the fact that nothing could possibly be as tiring or as challenging as our first month home, so this pales in comparison

3) the fact that activity at work has been ramping up slowly, which means I have been able to work from home two or three days a week

4) my incredibly smart, beautiful, sweet sons who once again have adjusted amazingly well and

5) the fact that Mark has carried 100% of the house cleaning burden, leaving me to spend 100% of my non-work time with the boys. Did I mention that my husband is amazing?

Not sure how I got so lucky, but I am :-)

Wordless Wednesday