One week left of my last ever maternity leave!

A week today I will have just done my first day back in work. In a brand new job *gulp*

As most working mothers do I suspect, I have mixed feelings about it.

I’m really looking forward to starting the new job. It’s a brand new role, in a relatively new team. So hopefully fewer distractions and office politics to worry about. No predecessors to live up to. No trying to back up to speed and suss out all the things that have changed in a year – people, politics, processes.

But it will be strange not going back to a place where I’ve spent over 10 years of my working life! Easier to leave there while I wasn’t actually there… otherwise I don’t think I ever would have left! (Does that make any sense lol?!!)

I’m not looking forward to the new level of tiredness. Baby S still wakes once a night. I’ve felt like an absolute zombie the last month or so… OH is busy getting our new house ready in the evenings so my days with the boys have been long.

I’m hoping it will be a different type of tired. Like ‘using-my-brain-tired’.

But it will be hard. Those days when you’re absolutely shattered and you decide to have a lazy day in your PJs watching cartoons… I’ll have to be up, dressed, make-up on and out the door!

It will be hard getting back into the daily grind, the routine… but then with our new routine of taking W to pre-school, it will feel easier than first time around when we could just do whatever we wanted every day!

Obviously I will miss the boys, but I’m looking forward to some time away from them. I could not be a SAHM forever. With the 2 of them, and W’s pre-school times, I find it harder to arrange meet-ups/play dates… so I’ve spent a lot of time with them… and not enough with other adults.

Hopefully my time with them will become more special. Less of the grind, fewer days where I don’t seem to actually spend proper time with them but just do chores all day. Chores… not sure how we’ll fit those in!

Having returned to work once before, I’m sure it will all go fine. But it’s certainly the end of an era. We are no way in a million years planning on having any more children, so no more maternity leave for me.. ever!

I’ve tried to spend the last few weeks making as many memories as possible through days out etc. W remembers and relays what we do weeks later, and Fridays will still be mummy-time and I’m sure we’ll get up to lots of Friday fun over the summer!

But yeah… still the end of an era