There is NO Instruction Manual

Apparently it's been just over 4 years since I posted to this blog, so... that's a good chunk of time, yeah? I recently have really been feeling the itch to start blogging again, so I came on to my account to create a new blog and saw this ol' blog just sitting here, neglected, and I thought, why start a new one when I can just jump start this one again?

Quick updates: Roger is 4 now. Almost 5. He was apparently 6 or 7 months old when I abandoned this blog, but he'll be starting kindergarten this fall, so you could say he's grown up some. We moved to Colorado in December of 2013, but I'm not entirely sure if that's relevant because I can't recall whether I ever previously mentioned in this blog where I lived (it was Nevada). I finished my Bachelors in December of 2013 (I pretty much walked off the stage at graduation, turned my tassel, and got into a U-Haul to head to Denver...okay, not that fast, but basically). I finished the CPA exam in February, I'll be getting my Masters in May, and I'm off to work in September.

So that's what this post is about: me going to work in September.

I'm panicking.

There is absolutely no instruction manual or guidance for how to be two career-minded parents and simultaneously raise a child. I know. I've Googled it.

When we lived in Nevada, I had the luxury of being able to take Roger to work with me. If I had class or whatever, my parents were just a short drive away to watch the little guy. Then we decided to uproot our entire lives, move 1,000+ miles away from all family, and see where that took us. Thusfar, it hasn't been so bad. I'm still in school, so juggling who picks up Roger from pre-k or who's cooking dinner or who's cleaning or the "whatever" has been pretty easy to manage. Admittedly, September is still a little ways away: I still have an entire summer of manageability. But then what?

The panic, oddly enough, stemmed with T-Ball. Since Roger is 4-almost-5, we decided to sign him up for T-Ball this season, and I just today received his game schedule. My first thought was, "Oh my God. How in the WORLD will we manage this schedule next year when we're both working??" (Uhh, don't do T-Ball? Maybe? But what if he loves it?) T-Ball is a surprisingly demanding sport. But it's not just T-Ball. It's everything: what do we during winter break? Spring break? Summer break? Snow days? Wednesdays (because for some reason Colorado elementary schools have decided it's necessary to let kids out at 1:45 every single Wednesday)?

The company I'm going to work for is a public accounting firm that is supposedly very family-friendly, very work-life balance oriented--flexible, in other words. This is one of the reasons they were the company I accepted a job offer from. Of course, I don't exactly know to what extent they mean that since I haven't actually started work yet, but Glassdoor has promising reviews. It is possible all of my panic is for naught. But on the other hand, maybe I  have a very exaggerated vision of what "work-life balance" means. My husband and I will have pretty identical work schedules once I start working and that creates an interesting problem. I have conflicting desires of wanting to raise my son and wanting to excel in my career; in my perfect scenario, they won't be conflicting desires, and I can handle both with ease, but I'm a pretty pragmatic individual, so it's probably best to assume the perfect scenario won't be reality.

Maybe I'm a little early to start freaking out, but I don't really believe that it's ever too early to try and plan out how it's all going to work. The problem I'm facing is that I can't plan out how it all will work because I have no idea. My mom was a WAHM and Matt's was a SAHM, so we have no experience to draw from. Other working parents we know seem to have figured it out in that one parent simply works less, or they have different work schedules so it's easier to juggle the demands of parenthood. I told my husband that I guess it'll be a lot of trial and error which is a bit difficult for me to swallow because I am sometimes (just a teensy bit) a control freak. I can accept spontaneity and deal with problems as they arise, but I like to have a game plan, some kind of foundation from which to work, and it's tough to have when we're treading in unfamiliar waters.