The Work Delimma

Back when I found out I was going to be induced, I sat down with my boss and we agreed that December 12 would be a good day for me to return to work. That effectively gave me 16 weeks off of work - 8 of which I would be working parttime from home. When we agreed to this on August 19, it seems like ages away. Now it is less than 2 weeks away.

I am definitely ready to go back to work - excited about it even. I've found a day care that I love and I really think Jayla will benefit from spending some time away from me each day. She loves being in new places and around new people so, I'm not that worried about leaving her. But I definitely have some concerns about returning to work:

1. Jayla is exclusively breastfed and I'm not ready to let go of that yet. I worry about not being able to pump enough for her. I worry about her losing interest in breastfeeding after taking bottles everyday. I worry about us losing that close time that we have for 6-8 hours everyday. I worry about finding a place and the time to pump while I am at work.

2. Jayla's sleep habits aren't where I would want them to be ideally. You can pretty much count on Jayla sleeping between 5 and 6.5 hours every night but, I'm still uneasy about it. I worry that she will all of a sudden decide to keep me up late or won't go back to sleep in the middle of the night for some reason. I worry about being sleep deprived and not enjoying my work as much because I'm so tired.

3. We are not used to being on any time schedule. I worry about my ability to get up early in the morning, have Jayla ready (whether I do it or my husband does it), get her to the day care, and me to work on time. I'm absolutely paranoid about being stuck in morning rush hour traffic where my normal hours usually put me on the road before most people.

I have come up with several solutions for these anxieties, including going back to work parttime in the beginning which would still allow me to feed Jayla myself more times than she is fed at the day care. Then I think, well, maybe I'd like to work parttime forever. But, I don't want to lose any of my benefits. Then I can't decide what type of parttime schedule to ask for. Then I think, maybe I should just go for it and see what happens - maybe my fears won't even prove to be actual problems.

I don't know so, I finally called my boss today and left him a message. I'm just going to lay my concerns out there and ask him to help me come up with a solution. He is very understanding like that and can probably give some insight. I'm expecting him to call back so, wish me luck...