We are about 1/5 of the way through the semester.  Not that I am counting.  Things with work are going well, although it has been very challenging.  I teach six 75-minute classes each week, all of which involve intensive discussions, group work, demonstrations and in-class experiments.  It’s a lot of planning.  Plus, I am advisor to 40 students.  Plus I work with admissions on marketing initiatives for recruiting students.  Plus I have to work on improving student retention.  Plus I manage the adjuncts, substitute for them when they can’t make it to class, evaluate their performance, and give them guidance.  Plus I work on curriculum development and course proposals.  And run panels on choosing majors.  And choosing careers.  Plus I am starting a Psychology Club.  And I am on a committee to establish an IRB at our institution.  And I have appealed to the Systems and Software Committee on behalf of our division for a major software purchase.  And I serve on the Library & Academic Resources Committee.  And I supervise a work-study student.  And I update our bulletin boards and website.  And write letters of recommendation for former students.  And hire people to teach courses in the spring.  And decide what those courses are.  And when they should be offered.

So I am a wee bit tired.

I miss Holden a lot.  I try to be really available for him in the mornings before we all leave for work and school.  And I try to be available for him in the evenings (although this is usually trickier b/c I have to juggle making dinner with also giving him attention).  When Holden wakes up at 5 or 5:30AM, I usually let him crawl into bed with us for a while, so he can get some good snuggle time with us.  I try to grab these little snippets of time with him, however I can.  We do fun things on the weekends, nearly every weekend, and every evening, (even though I promised myself I wouldn’t), I end up doing work, simply because that’s the only way it will all get done.  I do think it will get better as I get more experience with my job.  The courses I am teaching this term are all new preps, so although I did a lot of work on the courses over the summer, I am still familiarizing myself with how to teach the material, pretty much as I go.  I’ve adapted to teaching in this new environment fairly well, even though it wasn’t as seamless as I had hoped or expected.  I came from a large research university where teaching was done in a very lecture-based way.  At this new institution, things are much more interactive.  It is requiring some adjustments on my part, but on the whole, I feel like I made some progress this week with feeling more comfortable with the back-and-forth that should be a part of a good college dialogue.  I am confident it will get easier. I just think I am in for a very hard year.

Some of the things I wonder about:

1.  How will I find time to exercise more than once each week?

2.  How will I master the art of having meals planned for each day of the week?

3.  How can I manage my time better so I don’t have so much work to do in the evenings?

4.  Related to #3 above, how will I have time to read a novel, watch a TV show, or learn to knit in the evenings?

5.  How can I feel less guilty about spending so much time away from Holden?

6.  How can I get people to stop asking me ridiculous questions about when I plan on having a second child? (Um, I am too tired, and I don’t want to be more tired than I already am, thankyouverymuch!)

7. How can I fit in a massage?

8.  How can I fit in a optometrist appointment, since I recently lost my emergency back-up pair of glasses at a local park, and they are nowhere to be found, and I can’t see when I teach or when I drive, but there is no time to deal with this b/c I am too busy blindly doing my job?

9.  How can I sleep in?

10.  Sleep?

11.  More sleep?

So yeah, things are going well.  I still really enjoy my job.  I love the challenge of it.  It’s just a matter of finding that balance where I feel as if I am doing as much for my personal life as I am for my professional life.  I feel like finding the fulcrum is not a generic act—rather, with each new situation you encounter, you have to find a new way of supporting yourself and your family.  Balance is situation-specific.  And here we are in a new situation, trying to gain solid footing, trying not to fall.