6 year plan

Okay. Here is an update on our life and some good old fashioned rambling...

Brent passed his Administrator Certification Exam!!!!! He's done!! Now all that's left to do is find a job. We were a bit stressed out for the last 3 weeks before we got the results. There is a huge weight off our shoulders now, knowing he doesn't have to retake it.


Mariska is reading really well. She's already on the level she should reach by the end of the school year. We're pretty excited. She loves school.


Brynley is doing well. She's just hanging out with me. The highlights of her week are her speech therapy, playgroup and story time at the library.


I'm doing okay. For the last little while my brain has been running a mile a minute. Brent and I have been talking over the plans for me to go back to work. This would of course, include Brynley going to preschool or rather, daycare. I really want to go back to work and eventually get back into school, but I was having big issues with the idea of daycare and how it would pretty much make me the worst mother on the face of the planet. I also had fears that if I began working, then we would never find a good time or reason for me to stop in order to go back to school. Because we all know, there's never enough money! I talked that part over with Brent and we both made it very clear that my education is top priority... I felt better.
When it came to the daycare thing, I was having big issues with it one day and decided to google "daycare guilt" and see what I could find for how other moms work and balance it all. I found chats and forum after forum of women dealing with the guilt of putting their 6 week old, or 8 month old or 18 month old into daycare and how they were having guilt issues in adjusting to only seeing their babies 3 hours a day... Doing this alone, made me feel much better. I'm not dumping my infant somewhere to only see her 2-3 hours in a day. I'll be taking my almost 4 year old to preschool until just after naptime and have her home with me just in time to meet Mariska off the bus. Plus, with the schedule I'll be working, I'll keep her home with me one day a week until after she's actually 4. This day would either be a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, depending on the week.
The 2nd thing I did was I went to the web sites of the two daycares I really want to check out when the time comes. One of them had a link to their daily schedules. I got really excited for Brynley. I thought about how excited she always was to go to the Y and play in their little kid center. She's always super excited to go to speech and aks almost everyday "Mom, can we go to Brynley's school today?". Everyday before naptime they have "music and movement", and she will LOVE this. We were at the library the other day and she was sitting at a table doing puzzles next to another little girl. Listening to their conversation was hilarious and Brynley loved talking with her "friend". Both my girls are super social and really enjoy activities with other kids. I think the fact that I can put Brynley in a program she'll enjoy AND make money while doing it is a huge blessing for our family.
So, since I started feeling better about all that, my brain started focusing on what I'll need to do to get my RN. The biggest issue with this, is that the program is a full-time all day, all week program and I won't be able to be home with the kids in the afternoons... so it has to wait until they are old enough to handle being home alone for a couple hours. So I've listed out all the classes I'll need to take before applying to the program and made my "6 year plan", it starts with me going back to school part time in the spring semester of 2014. Once Brynley is in kindergarten and we won't have to pay for childcare, I'll go to PRN or rather "subbing", covering shifts, every now and then and focus on harder classes. Assumming all goes as planned, I should be done with my RN when Brynley is finishing 4th grade. This sounds like forever from now! It's kind of hard for me to have to wait so long, but we can't spend $500 a month on childcare, if I'm not working, and that's how much an afterschool program for both the girls would cost... and I'm not about to plan things around the idea that we might be making more at that time... I can't spend hypothetical money after all.
So that's my plan. And I'm super excited about it. I just hope I can get my cna and find a job quickly this summer to get the ball rolling!! And hope that I can work where I want to because they have the shifts that will work best for us.

And that is the end of my rant. Thank you.