Posts Tagged ‘stay at home’

April 6, 2020 – Day 19

Tuesday, April 7th, 2020

I probably should have started at day 1, but it didn’t seem like such a big deal two weeks ago.

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing dumb games on my phone to distract myself from real life, responsibilities, how loud my house is ALL THE TIME, and because I can’t sleep anymore. It’s not productive or healthy.

Then I remembered I had this long-neglected blog where I used to document our everyday lives as they happened. This time period doesn’t feel that different from 11 years ago this week when I had a brand new baby for the first time and I felt trapped, with an overwhelming amount of work to do, while also being bored out of my mind.

I’ve managed to keep up a 365 photo project for years now, not quite flawlessly, but pretty close. And although I’ve learned better than to make promises about returning to this space, I do hope I can turn it back into what it was originally meant to be by expanding my one photo a day to several days a week documented in photos. You’ll be seeing a lot of my messy house.

This was the first day of our second week of distance learning. The Davis Academy of Stop Touching Each Other needs to hire both a much better head teacher and a janitor ASAP.

As if I need another job

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

In my previous life, before I had Baby Evan, I worked in a real estate office. It was a job that literally fell into my lap and just seemed to fit. I started just answering the phones but when my boss offered to pay for my real estate licensing class I jumped at the chance. Eventually I was able to do a lot more, from writing contracts to holding open houses and managing all the advertising and paperwork for the office. It was just the right balance of creativity, busy work and down time for me and if things hadn’t changed I would have happily worked in that office for a long time.

Unfortunately, the housing market took a nose-dive, the small family real estate company re-branded itself as part of a large corporate entity, and I struggled to tolerate get along with all the agents in the office. Combined with my early pregnancy all day morning sickness and general malaise, office work no longer interested me and when the owner said they couldn’t really afford to keep me any longer I was happy to leave.

The only part of my job I’ve really missed (besides the paycheck) is my old manager. Her sales and listings created about 80% of my workload and we had a great relationship both inside and out of the office. She was a mentor and a friend and I spent a great deal of time with her and her family and consider them some of my favorite people. We’ve kept in touch for the past year and so when she called last night I was happy to hear from her. Turns out she left our old company and now is the office leader for a large, well established broker just down the street.

“And,” she said, “I’m looking for a part-time assistant. Any chance you want to job?”

I would LOVE the job. It’s only 12 or 15 hours a week. I would be working as her personal real estate assistant making a dollar an hour more than I made before. I could make more than enough money to support my knitting addiction habit and contribute a little to the household budget. I could channel my creativity into something productive instead of making an insane number of first birthday crafts. I could feel productive and helpful and purposeful.

But I have a baby that still doesn’t eat or take a bottle. E’s schedule is too unpredictable to count on him for childcare so I’d have to pay for a sitter. Even if it was just 4 hours it would be more than half my paycheck. Spending time with Baby Evan while he’s still young is worth a lot more to me than making a couple bucks an hour and I’d probably be a pretty lousy employee because I’d spend all my time thinking about what I might be missing. So it’s probably for the best that there is no conceivable way I can take that job right now. I even volunteered to work from home – for free – until she found someone, but I don’t have access to their computer system or the training I need to use it.

Truth is, I’m bummed.