Well! Hello there!

At the end of May, the powers that be let go of one of my co-workers, sending a crap ton of work in my direction and forcing me into a literal month or two of Sundays.  And the occasional Saturday.  Then, just as I was starting to see daylight again, they let go of someone else.
$%^&*($%!!!

I'm now either the next target or completely indispensable (yay???).  I nixed the weekends on this second go around and have even been leaving at 4 every day now that school started back up, but I am wiped out.  Done-burnt-crispy-drained-exhausted.  I love my job but by the time I get home, parent the children and shuffle them off to bed, I can barely wrangle the remote, much less a complete sentence here.

I have, admittedly, been watching unseemly amounts of TV.  Meh.  Passive, mind numbing, checking out (I'm mostly bitter because of the last Dexter episode & because I finally watched Million Dollar Baby.  Both left me grumpy).  It's better than becoming a raging alcoholic though, right?

All this naturally led to the mommy guilt.  In the middle of a FB discussion about after school activities, I chimed in with this little ray of sunshine:  "I'm back on 5 days/week and am home by 5 but I'm done, they're done, and we just don't... It's a great night if I make them turn off the TV and sit with them when they eat. It seems like such a bleak, subsistence only existence. No dance, no music lessons, no swim team.... 

How much fun are we?  Thankfully, the little Dear Abby voice in my head told me to shut up and fix the damn problem.  We haven't signed up for after school Spanish and basket weaving yet, but I've made a super human effort this last month to get out and DO things - Science Center!  Library!  Nature walks!  Greek parties!  So I do have blog fodder but, perversely, all the fun allowed even less time to sit down and write.  Why is finding balance so hard?  It seems to be a universal problem.

[The embeddy thing doesn't seem to be working in Feedly - here's a link to this very issue, explained in jelly beans]

This blog title was originally just a place filler but it stuck - life is not a trial run.  I just wish I could shake the feeling that I need more practice time.  Hrmmph.