Back to the Old Grind

So I went back to work last week. It's been OK. The first day was definitely the hardest. More for me than for Lukas. He was fine going to daycare. For me, it was hard to leave him all day long. It was the first time I left him with anyone except Edwin for 10 hours. We had a little scare last week when I had an allergic reaction to a new type of shellfish called periwinkle. I woke up congested and coughing. I thought that I was sick. I couldn't believe it because I didn't get sick while I was pregnant or in Lukas's first 4 months, so it's been over a year. I thought that maybe I had caught something on my first day back at work.

I was having a tough time getting to sleep because of the congestion. I woke up to get a drink of water and saw my reflection in the bathroom. My lips were completely puffy. That was when I realized that I had an allergic reaction to dinner. Luckily, the reaction only lasted one day and I was able to take Claritin and it cleared up. Now I know what I would look like with collogen- not good.

We are still trying to get the logistics of getting to work down, but it's tough. Lukas's daycare closes at 5:30 and I feel like we're racing against the clock to get back to Alameda in time. That's the toughest part. I really like our daycare provider. She was a little more expensive, but I think that she is worth it. I had interviewed several home daycares and many of them seem to have older children that play a little rougher. Some of them had the TV running while I was there and I found the caregivers paid more attention to me than the children. There was one that had a really clean house, but no toys in sight. What kind of daycare doesn't have toys?

Work itself has also been tough. There have been a few rounds of layoffs while I was gone and a lot of my coworkers were moved to another building. It is very depressing to see all the empty cubicles around me. I used to be able to say that I had fun at work and liked the people around me. Now, the work is OK, but I can't stand my disorganized project lead. It really goes to show that work is really impacted by the people that you work with. If you have good people, it makes bad work tolerable. If you have good work, but bad people, you can still be miserable.

Last weekend, we spent most of it at the new Schneider house in Castro Valley. We painted, helped organize the kitchen, and picked up food. It reminded me of how hectic it was when we first moved in. While we are mostly settled now, there are still some things Edwin and I still haven't gotten around to doing. I feel like we are always cleaning the garage. We also managed to lock ourselves out of our house this weekend. After painting/hanging out until 1AM, we got home and realized that we had left the keys in the house. Our next door neighbor has our spare keys, but we didn't feel comfortable waking them up at 2AM to get it. Jeannette also has a key, but we couldn't reach her either. So we ended up having an impromptu sleepover at Show's since she was also a fellow painter. This just shows that we need to hide a key. Edwin and I keep talking about doing that, but we haven't.