Taking care of business

On Tuesday I loaded Sammy and myself into the car and headed up to Alexandria. The trip was half business, half pleasure. The business part was finding the testicular fortitude to tell my boss that I wasn't going to be returning to work, while the pleasure part was introducing Sammy to the rest of the gallery staff and taking advantage of the beautiful weather to walk around Old Town for a bit.

Originally my plan had been to return to work on a part-time basis, hopefully with the baby in tow, and then work my way back to full-time. Ah, to be that naive again! It is to laugh. Then along came Sammy, and with him, reality. There are simply not enough hours in the day for me to commute two hours (sometimes more!), work full-time, and then come home and take care of Sammy. Maybe if I could clone myself...but only then. And don't even get me started on the cost of childcare. If I had to pay someone to watch him while I worked, I would be losing money every day. Just not worth it. Plus there's the overseas move looming in the not-so-far future to plan. So yeah, going back to work in the traditional sense was just not going to happen. Fortunately, my boss was very understanding of the situation. I'm sure his reasonableness was helped along by Sammy being very cute throughout our entire visit, plus my offer to gallery-sit a few Saturdays here and there, and work on research projects from home certainly didn't hurt. Evidence of the cuteness:


Having taken care of that part of the trip, I loaded Sammy up into his stroller and off we went. We headed over to Lee Street where my friend, Chris, has an antiques gallery so that Chris and Sammy could meet. We caught up on some of the latest news and talked shop for a bit; I let him know I wasn't returning back to work and that I'd be happy to take on some research projects for him if he was so inclined. Chris actually had something in the gallery that he hadn't been able to look into, so I left Alexandria with my first work-from-home project. It will be so nice to use my brain again; it's kind of been on auto-pilot these past few weeks. Also, it will be good to have a source of income to call my own, no matter how small it is. I've discovered that I can wring out about an hour or two to myself to work if I put Sammy in the Bjorn, as he promptly falls asleep as soon as I get him situated--plus I then get two hands to type with. Bjorn, 1; Baby, 0. Evidence of the Bjorn in action (and my new haircut):