Tori's New Job, and What That Means for the Kiddos

After nine months of staying home with the kids, Tori started her new position with the National Park Service this week.  I'm really excited for her because I know that she'll enjoy her work -- her main focus will be to attract diverse and nontraditional audiences to engage with the park.  This is actually the third time (in a row) that we've worked for the same organization, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before it happened.  There are many things I really love about working with Tori, although this time around we're in a much larger office and won't work together too closely.

Although I think her decision to accept this position was the right one for our family, it's been really hard these first few days.  This is the first time we've ever put our kids in full-time daycare and Charlie has been really unhappy about it.  He's not one to keep his feelings bottled up inside, and the screams of despair have been really hard to take.  I know it will get better, but for now it just keeps getting worse because he's building up anxiety earlier and earlier in the morning.  

Sometimes I think mothers over-dramatize how torn apart they are when leaving their kids behind to go to work.  I personally have never really experienced that in the past.  It was more like, "Catch you later."  But this situation with Charlie has been really emotionally exhausting and I feel like it's clawing at my heart in a way I've never experienced before.  I think it's partly because Charlie is a way less go-with-the-flow than Skip or Zadie (and this is his first time in daycare), partly because it gets dark so early right now, and mostly because we always had the good fortune of having Uncle Hank.  Leaving your kids at a little institution is just a much harder experience (though Skip and Zadie did go to a local daycare a few days a week).  There's something about doing it five days a week that seems really hard.

Then again, I know plenty of people whose kids have been in similar situations since they were three months old and it's not like I look at those kids with pity.  I've never been one of those people who think it's a travesty to have kids in daycare all day.

But this Charlie thing is killing me!