to work or not to work

I'm officially a SAHM(Stay At Home Mom) now. Partially by choice and partially by circumstance. Last fall we looked into daycare and put ourselves on a waiting list, only to discover this month that we are STILL on the waiting list and will not have a chance of moving off until September. Great.

Part of me is quite disappointed. I wish I had at least been able to make the choice out of my own volition, not because we have no childcare. (Technically, we could hire a nanny to provide childcare, but neither of us wants to do that.) I'll miss my work friends and regular interaction with adults. I had just gotten a promotion last November and I had been hoping to get more experience in my new role. Our department moved locations while I was on leave and I heard that I was assigned an office all to myself. With a window. And a door! But of course work is not without its stresses. My job kept me pretty busy and with the promotion, I would have had to work more late nights and early mornings than I would probably like to now that I have a baby.

So I'm a little relieved too. It would've been a tough decision and it does seem a bit too early to go back. Aaron is growing so fast. I remember dressing him when we were coming home from the hospital and everything was just huge and flopping around on him. His feet barely reached the knees in most of his outfits. And now I've already had to put away some of those same outfits because he can't fit into them anymore. And it's not only his clothes that he's outgrown. In his first few weeks of life, he used to make this face where he would look kinda curious and scrunch his lips up into this teeny tiny 'O' shape and his mouth would shrink until it became little dot on his face. Alas, we never got a picture of him doing it because we never expected him to outgrow it so quickly.

If I were to go back to work, I know it would feel like his life was almost passing me by and I would probably miss a lot of his little phases. Like how he has recently become enamored of the lamp in our living room. He'll whine until we move him so that he can see it. And then I'll catch him alternately grinning at it and looking away shyly. It looks like he's flirting. He did this repeatedly for an hour the other day. Apparently it's his new best friend.

It's weird - I'm excited for him to grow and develop more - to start sitting up! talking! crawling! and walking! But I'm already nostalgic for his little tiny mouth face and all his clothes that he's already outgrown and I'm a little sad to know that some day he will wriggle out of my arms to run around as fiercely as he cries to be held in them now.