Family/work balance...

Last Monday, Dad had asked if I would be available to give him a hand on two small jobs on Thursday. I jumped at the chance! I looked forward to it all week!!
...and then Wednesday night I couldn't sleep because I was worried how Saphira, Michael & Pepper would cope with my absence. Ok, Ok...so Pep would be just fine, but in my head I worried about her too :) Although I have tonnes of milk in the fridge, Princess has been a little difficult lately when it comes to taking a bottle. So we've let it slide. Its not like I'm not going to be available to feed her for the next few weeks, right? Wrong! As proved by last Thursday!

We woke up super early (5:30am) so that I had plenty of time to give her a good feed before I had to leave. The problem with that is that it was too early for her, and she just wanted to go back to sleep!! Grrrr! So she had a great feed out of one side, and not much out of the other. Dad had predicted a 3/4 day, so I wasn't expecting to be home before 2:30-3pm. So, once I'd gotten my whole family settled back into their beds, I left for work. I almost bounced the whole way down the hill to the work truck! I jabbered on the whole way to the first job, before I realised that Dad wasn't chatting that much (clearly he'd gotten out of practice during my absence over the last 12 weeks!) The only dampner on my day was that approximately every 23 seconds, I was thinking about my baby...
And, we knew we wouldn't have any mobile service reception at either job, so if there was a problem at home, Michael wouldn't be able to get into contact with us. *sigh*

Anyway, because Dad and I are such an awesome team, we finished the first job by 8:30am (because that's just how we roll) and had started the second job by 9am (yeah, we rock!). Fortunately, both jobs went exceedingly smoothly and we were home by 10:45am!! *high five*

I stopped at the house to give Mum the mail, and then raced home as I really needed to feed!
I'd gotten the whole way up the hill and in the gate before Pepper saw me - I could see her playing by herself in the yard the whole way. And man, was that worth going to work for a few hours! She missed me!! :D I swung around the corner of the house and came in the back door, only to surprise my Husband and Beb-beh as they hadn't heard the work truck pull in, and they were both SO happy to see me!!

So here I was, having missed them every 23 seconds for 5+ hours, and they'd slept in until 10am!! The buggers hadn't even had the good sense to miss me until 45 minutes before I'd come home!! (Apparently Saphira screamed for the whole 45 minutes she was awake, but when I'd come home she wasn't making a peep!) :)

So basically, doing a volunteer mini-day at work was a total success! :)

On Friday we had planned to have a trip to the Temple, but Michael's Mum called early in the day to say that their household was sick :( (they were going to mind the Beb-beh while we went together) but we decided to go anyway, and we had heaps of errands to run in the city.

In the end, my exceptionally generous Husband volunteered to mind Saphira while I went in and did an Initiatory Session. I needed to go to the Temple. We hadn't been since the very early days of our pregnancy. Personally, I think Michael loved minding her, as he went and showed her off to some of his friends :) A very proud Daddy, that one!! :)

I'd been feeling quite down for about two weeks prior to our Temple visit. Going to work for a few hours certainly buoyed me up, but going to the Temple really completed me. I'm so glad we have a Temple so close to us :) We have now made promises to each other that we will try to get there EVERY week, even if that means one of us has to sit outside with the baby, because we function better as a family when we commit to going regularly :)