This week has been a killer in terms of the volume of stuff to do. I don't want to complain about it too much because I like to be busy and I particularly enjoy the summer programs we're running right now. This is my opportunity to interact with the students and what I do on a daily basis has direct, immediate and observable impact. I think it's great. And I love to be busy. It makes the day go faster and I love to look back at my day and be pretty impressed with the amount of stuff I got done.

And the extra work I'm doing? The freelance writing, well, I admit that after long days of tremendous busy-ness at work, coming home and doing more work does sometimes strike me as an unbearable chore. But really, I like it, too. I enjoy taking a pile of information, sorting through it, putting it into logical order and then summarizing it in an appealing (sales-y) way. It's kinda fun and I really love that doing it gets me extra money. The truth is I haven't done one so far that's required more than two or three hours of my time.

And, oh yeah! I'm taking a summer class, too! And I do have work to do for that, but I'm a little behind already because I don't have all my books yet. Which just means I'm gonna pay with some of my free time later.

Every once in a while I get small pang that I've had to tell Michael I need to work at my computer as soon as we get home when I know he wants me to play with him. I try to wait until after he goes to bed to start working on homework or freelance work. But when the days are so busy and I'm a bit more tired exhausted than usual, I'm just dying to get started and get it done with as soon as possible. Plus, if I relax TOO much right when I get home, I'll for sure never get motivated to sit down and do work.

But then that cycles back and devolves into my own guilt over being a single mom and having failed at making a complete family for him. It hurts my heart sometimes that I don't have more free time to spend with him and that he doesn't have a daddy or a brother or sister to play with. I think sometimes he'll look back on his childhood and his most abiding memory of these years will be of me sitting at my computer.

But he is so sweet and flexible and forgiving and when I think of that (which is nearly every minute of every day) I remind myself to just stop and spend time focused totally on him. Remind myself that he is not an interruption to what I'm doing right now, he's my whole reason for doing all of it.

So, I spent nearly an hour this evening snuggled with him on the sofa watching cartoons. We talked about silly stuff and laughed together. Then I made us dinner and we ate together. Then I gave him his shower, read a story to him and kissed him goodnight. I even went back in a few minutes later to take him his stuffed animal and kissed him again. I'll probably stop in a third time tonight before I got to bed just to kiss his sweet little sleeping face.

It's a trick, sometimes, balancing all the work I need to do to get us positioned where I can earn a comfortable living for us while at the same time not sacrificing ALL our time together. That's always the trick for a single parent. I won't settle for a meager existence for him (or myself, for that matter), so I'm willing to work as hard as I have to to get us there. But I also need and want to really nurture him so that he won't miss out on the whole concept of family too much.

I hope he'll remember me working hard and instead of feeling cheated of time I could have spent with him, he'll look at it more as an example for his own life and know that working hard and sacrificing some of the things you want to do for things you have to do puts you ahead of the game in the long run.

I'm as finished as I can be with this day and happy to be home. Home where my baby is, home where I'm comfortable and relaxed. Home that I made for us.