One Quarter (Almost) Down. Two More Years To Go.

Tomorrow is the last day of my first quarter back in school and I have to say that I beyond excited to be wrapping up this quarter.  These past two months have been an incredible amount of work and while I expected to have my nose to the grindstone a lot of the time, if I'm being honest, my nose was to the grindstone a lot more than I was hoping.  Needless to say, Ben and the kids have been absolute champs in adjusting to this new period in our lives.

The last two months have also been incredibly humbling as I went from being a competent professional in one line of work, to a completely incompetent student.  I'm not going lie - there were many days that I missed feeling "good" at something.  Fortunately, those days were offset by the ones where I felt pretty bad-ass at learning something new.  And if I have many thanks to give to Ben for picking up the slack around the house, I have many, many thanks to give to my sister who constantly reminded me that learning is a process and to cut myself a little slack in that process.

Lastly, the last two months have been reassuring.  When I left my job I felt pretty unmotivated and I figured that obviously the problem was me.  I thought that this was just my new normal - tired, old, and unmotivated.  I really worried that once I got into something that required a much greater time and mental commitment I was going to find that I just wasn't up to the challenge anymore.  Fortunately, as it turns out, I was wrong.  I'm not an unmotivated person; I was just in a job that I had outgrown and because of that it was hard to muster up motivation at times.  In fact, I've been pleasantly surprised by my motivation over these last two months and the amount of work that I've put in to this 3rd go-round at college (3rd!!).

And with that, it's back to the books for me.  One more day of studying and then a couple weeks of doing nothing but hugging my kids, giving Ben high fives, enjoying life, and, of course, sewing!