This morning Mrs Detrecto had to go out and run some errands. This meant that mini Detrecto and myself were left trying to navigate some home schooling and home working.
Mini Detrecto is a beautiful child. She is funny and clever and has a unquenchable appetite for questions that I don’t know the answer to. And it’s lovely and inspiring to watch her interact with the world around her.
But just occasionally… just very, very occasionally… like, once every 20 seconds or so, she will need some physical connection to help her make sense of the world. I presume this is part of her autism diagnosis. Most of the time it’s lovely and wonderful as she snuggles in and unknowingly asks with her body language that she needs reassurance and to make sense of her feelings.
And I would never, ever deny her that.
But here’s the thing – sometimes you have to get work done. And it’s really hard to plan a day, type up notes, feed the animals, organise the house and send text messages whilst you have a 7 year old human shaped barnacle attached.
On one hand it’s something I’ll never get sick of, on the other I have anxiety knowing how much I’m falling behind at work or not justifying my wage as I can’t work 40 hours whilst sharing home schooling of someone who needs 25 – 30 hours per week of direct supervision to get work done. Add in the general day to day cleaning, cooking, gardening etc and it can get pretty overwhelming.
*Insert caveat about knowing that people have it worse and I should shut the fuck up here*
But… but… I’m an optimist. And once Mrs Detrecto arrived home from her errands I got into work mode. And I started to catch up on work from last week. Only to find that I’d been organised enough to do about a third of it already – I just hadn’t remembered. And so with the extra time afforded to me I caught up all my extra work and then relaxed knowing that I would at least be on par for the rest of the day wrote a blog post instead.
Oh and the header image, exactly how I felt when I found my already done work.