Today was another joint visit to our respective doctors. I had my 4 week appointment this morning and everything's looking good. Stitches are healing well, my blood pressure is back to normal, and everyone was impressed with Ronan and how much he'd grown.
And grown he has! Two weeks ago, he was just over 7lbs. Today he was 9lbs and 4 oz. Obviously, nursing has been going well. :) He's in the 45th percentile for both weight and length (he's 21 and a quarter inches), so just in the middle. The nurse practitioner was very satisfied with how he's doing - she commented on how alert he was and how well he was moving his head. I really like our pediatrician (and this nurse practitioner was great too). My only complaint is how cold they keep the office, especially considering that the first thing we have to do when we get into the exam room is strip him down - you'd think that if babies are going to be spending their entire appointments in their diapers, they could at least keep the temperature up. I won't be surprised if, come summer, they have the AC cranked too. Oh well.
Oh, and in other news, I've received rejection letters from both the U of M and UW Madison. I'm not too disappointed. While I would love to be accepted (if for no other reason than just to boost my self-esteem :) ), I realize the timing now is bad - it would be very difficult for us to try to sell this house and find a new job for Tom in such a short period of time. We're thinking now though of taking this year and fixing up the house and, depending on how things go, put it on the market next year and just move to MN anyway. We're both ready for a change and now that Ronan's here, I'd love to be closer to my family. But we'll see how things play out.
The other dilemma is whether I should go back to work. I've called around to a couple of daycare places and while the prices aren't unreasonable, I just don't really make enough to justify it. The big problem is that my position at Sterling is technically a consultant one - as a result, I don't get a W2 and no taxes or anything are withheld from my check. I end up paying the taxes myself - this year it was just under $2000 and that was with me only having worked at Sterling for 4 months. In order to prepare for that, I put a portion of each check into our savings. I figured that after taking that out of my check and then the cost of daycare, I'd be making around $72 (if I go back fulltime) or $35 (part time) a week. Really not worth it, considering the cost of gas (work is about 25 miles away). So I'm going to talk with my supervisor and boss and see what other options there are (i.e., working from home). We also might try me working on days that Tom has off and he can watch Ronan. Of course, Tom will be back to working at night, so we're not sure how that'll work. But luckily, we don't have to decide tomorrow.
1 comment:
i'm so glad to hear that Ronan is growing so well! Good job, mom!!!
About the work, might I suggest that you try to figure out if you are considering work because you feel like you want to, ought to, or need to? With Ellie, I didn't really have a choice because we were leaving in a few months for PR. I never would have chosen to not return to the paid work for (it felt very anti-Minnesotan and sort of decadent) but the truth is that I loved it - especially for the first year. I was ready for some space by the time she was 13-14 months old, but I really cherish that year I had with her.
With Frisco, I felt like I both ought to work and needed to work (student loans, natch) but I also really wanted to spend time with him. I ended up compromising at working 20 hours a week. He now spends about 4 days week at daycare but until he was 6 months, he was home with me.
When explaining to people about working now, I tend to frame it in terms of "need" - it's hard living on one salary, I have these loans, I need to stay competitive in my field, but the truth is that I really just wanted to stay home with Frisco. Again, I couldn't bring myself to stay home 100% of the time - I felt too much like Joe was bearing all the load for our family and even though I don't make much in actual $$, I do feel like I'm investing in our future by getting good experience. But if I didn't have these loans, I probably would have stayed home with Frisco 100% of the time. It just took me until kid #2 to realize that "want" was okay and I didn't just have to do what I ought to or needed to do.
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