22 months

What's that you say?  My kid is actually 23 months and a day?  Well then, I'll keep this brief. I'm already starting to forget the details of the last month so I'll let the images do most of the updating on this one.

Here we are enjoying a visit to Berkeley's Aquatic Park, a recent addition to our rotating schedule of playground staples and site of Elias's 2nd birthday party next month.

Hopefully the weather will be warmer and the toddler less squirmy for the birthday festivities.  And here's Elias in one of Mommy's favorite get-ups: comfy pants and slippers.

Otherwise, as I mentioned in the Easter update, month 22 was almost entirely spoken for by a nasty, lingering cold that eventually developed into pink-eye, the cold part of which Elias passed along to both Neal and me.  The pink-eye portion overlapped with two of Elias's three daycare days one week, leaving me less than a day that week to get all of my work done, and preceded yet another business trip for Daddy.  Needless to say I still haven't figured out how to successfully juggle this whole career/motherhood thing.  Fortunately I work for myself so it's not like I have to take a sick or vacation day every time he's out of daycare.  Unfortunately, the work I miss one day carries over into the next, creating quite a backlog of projects and orders in a really short amount of time.  I'm only now feeling a little bit caught up and that's mainly because I'm in a bit of a lull, between summer and fall weddings, which of course sends me into an entirely different sort of frenzy, worrying about how much I'm financially contributing to the budget and whether or not I can justify having Elias in daycare for any portion of the week.  But I'm just not sure how I feel about the possibility of being a full-time stay-at-home-mom again. 

So what did we do to address this dilemma? Increase Elias's daycare days from three to four, naturally.  I guess my thought was that for just a bit more each month, I'd get four to five extra days to work, and at least two to three daycare days each week, regardless of illness, holidays, vacations, etc.  I'm hoping I can take on enough new orders to justify the increase and have, once again, begun sending out resumes to 9 to 5 type jobs. So I guess you'd say we're taking a wait and see approach, for the time being at least. 

And, anyway, before you know it, this kid will be in preschool!