Annoyed and Bulleted

• It is officially Sunday, which means I have less than 24 hours until my date of return to work. How can I leave this teeny-tiny baby already? It just reminds me how inadequate maternity leave allowances are in this country. I'm fortunate to work for a generous company that actually pays for six ("natural" delivery) to eight (c-section - "unnatural"?) weeks of maternity leave. I got eight for my scheduled c-section, and then extended my time two more weeks with the vacation and comp time I've saved up. It sounds like a lot, but now that it's over, it hardly seems like enough.
• As short as this leave seems, I'm reminded that my last job paid zilch, zero, NOTHING for maternity leave. All they did was allow you up to 12 weeks of unpaid family medical leave without firing you (although they encouraged you not to take more than six). That's the bare minimum required by law in Massachusetts. And the government thinks that's generous. How many women do you know that can give up their full-time job for 12 weeks without pay?
• At the same time, I'm bombarded with messages of guilt from that same government. They're insistent that I need to breastfeed for at least 6 months, preferably a year, to reduce the country's health care costs and prevent my child from becoming a part of the so called "obesity epidemic". Well, how exactly do they expect me to do that while I'm away from my daughter over 9 hours a day? Why, pump, of course! Tear myself away from my job every 3 hours to hook myself up to a machine and milk myself. The process itself takes up to 20 minutes, not to mention washing all of the pump parts each time so it can be ready for the next session. I can hardly wait to look for the time in between the numerous meetings that have already been scheduled for me - including a four hour meeting next week.
• Ethan starts school on Monday, and I had the pleasure of getting a phone call from the school telling me all of his medical forms are expired. I guess I was supposed to know this by osmosis, since no one mentioned this before Friday afternoon. Then again, maybe this was a common sense issue that I should have questioned myself, but I've been a bit distracted what with the round the clock nursing and sleep deprivation the past few months, and they knew this. So now I have to scramble around first thing Monday morning, faxing forms to doctors offices and begging them to fill them out and fax them back to the school ASAP so that he can continue to get his medications. I'm sure they won't mind at all, considering they normally require two weeks to complete forms like these. And doctors' offices are nothing if not flexible.
• In other news the school forgot to share with us - my father-in-law, a teacher in Ethan's school system, ran into Ethan's teacher last week. Teaching. At another school. This was news to us. We had been told at his IEP meeting and in every conversation that she was going to be his teacher for two more years, and we made every effort to foster a relationship with her so that we could all work on the same page. From his first day at school, we went in to meet her, made time to call her periodically to check in on his progress, and kept her posted about his changing appointments and treatments. Now we're going to have to break a new teacher in and do what feels like starting all over again.
• The best part? No one bothered to tell us. We found out by accident. His teacher from last year always gave us the impression that she would continue working with him, even through the end of his summer session in August, when she wrote "See you in September!" in his notebook. (I guess she forgot to write "NOT" at the end.) Ethan would have started school on Monday without us ever knowing he had a new teacher. We don't even know her name. Maybe it's no big deal for most kids to start Kindergarten with a stranger for a teacher, but things are a little different for Ethan. We would have liked the opportunity to meet with or speak to her personally, rather than just sticking him on the bus and hoping for the best.
• I just checked my credit card statement and I'm afraid someone has stolen my number. There's a charge on there for over $100 - from some shop in Great Britain. I'm making a permanent dent in my couch and haven't showered in nearly a week; needless to say, the only England I've been to recently is New England. To add insult to injury, there's a tidy little fee for my "Foreign Transaction" on the bill.
• I'd call to dispute this charge if it weren't for one little technicality - all of the customer service numbers are available only Monday through Friday. Apparantly emergencies can only happen during regular business hours. Very helpful. More personal business for me to handle on my first day back at work.
• My mind is still not back to it's former sharpness, and I really miss it. I can't imagine being able to work very efficiently at this point with all of the holes in my thinking. To make matters worse, I've taken up that terrible parent technique of calling my kids by the wrong names. During a conversation with CG today, I called him "Ethan" by accident. It just pointed out how exhausted I am, because in five years I have never had a two-way conversation with Ethan, especially about weed-wackers.
• I'm especially tired of thinking in fractioned bullet points. You'd think this was a lazy writing technique, but really it's not. Everything inside my mind is in the form of choppy shopping lists. I can't handle anything complex yet. I look forward to the day I can think in paragraph form again. Oh, my good friend the topic sentence. How I miss you so.