These last two months have been wild for me. I took an intentional week off from posting to focus on relaxing and self-care. I had full intentions of picking back up after the week was over, but then I had to prepare for a massive family cruise trip the next week. After getting back from that trip, I spent the next full week playing catch up with housework and jumping into working two part-time jobs Monday through Friday. 

Needless to say, I’m absolutely exhausted. But, I’ve been working extremely hard on setting goals for myself and sticking to them. I’ve also been trying to maintain my intention of placing self-care on the front burner of my stove when it previously wasn’t even anywhere near the thing.

Still, it’s been tough. And, try as he does, it’s difficult for my husband to understand me when I try to effectively communicate my thoughts and emotions.

Trial & Error

Regardless of the increased awareness, I knew I still needed to adjust how I was working to complete each of my tasks for the day. In a previous post, I went into detail about how I scheduled my day to get everything done. It was working absolutely great! Until I took on another part-time job.

Initially, I had an extremely efficient routine of dropping Kyrie off at school, taking Bentley on a walk, completing whatever cleaning task I assigned myself for that day, getting Ellia down for her nap, and then logging on for work around 11:30/12. It was working almost too well, in fact. 

I was feeling like a new and improved version of myself—the busy bee in me fueled by the ability I had to cross off all of the items on my task lists, and the mom and wife in me attaining a high sense of fulfillment and importance by spending time and doing things for my family. 

Still, I had the stress of working a job that was more than half of what I was originally making in my last role. Things were doable, but they weren’t going to be comfortable. So, I decided to try to take on another part-time job to balance it out. After all, I was only working part-time, so I had more than enough time to take on another 4 hours of work each day.

My husband and I spoke about it and laid out what the day-to-day timeline would look like. After planning, I got back into contact with an old CEO friend of mine to ask about part-time admin help if he needed it. It was good timing for him, and we set it up.

The new plan was for me to take Kyrie to school, come home and walk with the dog/clean up a little around the house, log on for job #1 for about 2.5 hours, log on to job #2 until it was time to get Kyrie from school, then log back into job #2 to finish up the last 2-ish hours, logging off for the day around 5:30/6–plenty of time to get dinner going and do homework with Kyrie.

What actually ended up happening was this: my anxiety took over. The demand of job #2 had me logging off much later than I was anticipating (around 7 or 8 pm). And, while this is something that I knew would not be daily, I psyched myself out and got off track. Despite my detailed efforts at establishing an effective routine, I wasn’t able to maintain or even appropriately adjust when the late log-offs started happening. 

Hubs was great, of course. He was understanding about the acclimation period that comes with new jobs and changing routines. He picked up the cooking during the week and I took over dinner on the weekends. I adjusted Kyrie’s homework plans to be more independent than one-on-one (fortunately, his teacher is also amazing at assigning daily homework and sending it home a week before it’s due). And, the baby would go with dad for a bit when he got home so I could wrap up as quickly as possible, then I would take over again for bath and nighttime routines while Dre started doing his homework. 

It’s definitely not an ideal schedule, especially since I’m technically part-time and Dre is trying to get school work done ahead of time to spend his days off with the kids. But I’m thankful he’s been so helpful.