Hi Ho Hi Ho Its Off To Work I Go

Today was my full first day without kids, and to be honest I am not sure how I feel about it. It was great dropping AJ off at preschool and driving to the gym without lugging Addie and all her stuff to the child watch room and then only having an hour to workout. Today I was able to workout as much as I want and as long as I wished. Plus it was great with missing a week because of Addie's cold and my own head cold not allowing us to get to the gym last week.

So after that I went home and actually took a shower where I could shave my legs and exfoliate! Seriously all mommies know that it is a glorious feeling to be able to do anything for yourself, particularly grooming, without a small voice interrupting. Then I went to train at my new job, which really used to be my old job.

That's right folks I am working the desk again at DeStress. The current receptionist, LaQuanda, is moving on to a new job so my mom, the owner and founder of DeStress Express, thought it would be a perfect solution for me to take LaQuanda's place. For the last two years I have been pretending to be a real estate agent, but really I have been a mommy. I never wanted to be a real estate agent but at the time it seemed like a job that I could be successful in and still have a life because my former job as a retail store manager did not let me have a life at all. The problem is I am a nice person and the majority of agents are overly competitive and mean to each other. I never felt comfortable asking my friends and family for referrals, that is how good real estate agents build their business.

During my time as a real estate agent I sent an article on real estate things to a local newspaper, the Oyster Pointer, and it was accepted. I hadn't written a piece for publication in almost five years so this was a big deal. Then I was asked to be a regular and I think that was the beginning of the end to my real estate career because I started getting more compliments on my articles than on my real estate methods.

So this is a long way of explaining that I am now going back to work as an office manager and lucky for me the Oyster Pointer has asked me to remain as a freelance writer which is really what I want to do and that will help me build my portfolio.

But the biggest dilemma of the day is I didn't miss the kids today. I know that this is a good thing because I trust the people Big Papi and I have hired to take care of them and that I am ready to go back to work. The bigger problem I have is that it proves that I am not a person who can be about her children all the time. I need an identity outside my mommy role. Yes I am proud to be AJ Rice's mommy x 2 but I am also a wife and a woman with talents other than pushing out babies.

For those mothers who make the choice to put your kids above everything else are afraid to step out of the mommy role to reclaim the talent lives they had before the kids came. Going back to work for me is doing that for myself, reclaiming the woman who just happens to also be a mommy.

The Headache Heard Round The World

This morning I woke up with the worse headache ever. It felt as if all my blood vessels in my brain were going to explode at once and any sort of light or loud noise was unbearable. Even right now I can feel my head wanting to return back to the worse headache ever position.

The problem with having a headache or any body ache like that is not the actual physical pain of the experience but the fact that mommy is on the sidelines and with a house full of aliens and cavemen the Mommy cannot be out of commission. Big Papi was great, he rubbed my neck and temples trying to give the pounding somewhere to go, and trying to keep the kids quiet. This was at four in the morning and of course AJ, the caveman who we are trying to potty train, wet the bed and his pants and then decided to be "nice" to mommy by climbing on her. We got him changed and dry and then the alien, Addie, woke up and needed to be fed, again Big Papi took care of that. Around 7:00 this morning AJ was getting dressed and Big Papi took him to preschool and then came home. We have arranged for a sitter for Addie to actually start in a few weeks when I go back to work full time, but thank goodness Kelly was able to take her today because there would be no way to recover from the worse headache and an alien.

But now that the headache is just a tiny fraction of the pain, I feel guilty that Addie is at a babysitter, that I wasn't the one to clean up AJ, and that my poor Big Papi had to take care of all of us and still go to work.

And so it begins...

I am the proud mommy of two AJs. My son, Anderson James, is who we call AJ and he is two and the caveman. My daughter, Addison Joy, is three months and why I really have two "AJs," is an alien. You may think that those are strange terms to describe the best things in my life, but anyone who has spent any time with babies and toddlers understand that those terms acurrately describe these stages of life. I am also married, we'll call him Big Papi, because well he is a big guy and a great dad but sometimes we test each other's nerves.

So why am I blogging? There is a lot going on in my life, besides the children and the husband, I am really an aspiring writer. I can't believe I actually wrote that, but it is true, the only thing that I have ever wanted to do. Writing became my passion in the eight grade when an amazing English teacher gave me an assignment to describe a bittersweet experience.

Since then my life of course has changed in many ways from my experiences in high school to my first attempt at college, trying to be a calm person by becomming a massage therapist, then becomming the babysitter in lotion land to trying to become a real estate agent during the worse real estate market in a century. So right at this moment I am working a day job as an office manager and going to school full time to finish my English degree. My ultimate goal is to become a full time paid writer, so the blog I thought would at least give me exposure but get me back into the habit of writing daily.

The goal of the blog is to let my have a place to vent or talk about what is going on with my day. After the experiences of having two children, you can feel kind of lost because your entire life becomes about the kids. From the moment I wake up, and sometimes before I wake because there is usually at least one kid in the bed, I am constantly on the move. So, I hope you enjoy and leave comments.

AJ Rice's Mommy x 2