17 weeks, 4 days...

This week I’ve really felt the emotional ups and downs. I can attribute that to my stressful and hectic job, I mean who in their right mind supervises 11-12 people (women) willingly? Someone who’s insane like me is who! On top of the surmounting pressure of trying to supervise all of these people, I have an insane amount of pressure to succeed, re-shape and improve this entire department. All of it, somewhat on my own with a sales guy for a director. I seriously cannot believe how many nights I toss and turn just dreaming about work. Why aren’t I a normal person who starts off supervising 1 or 2 people? What the hell was I thinking doing all of this while pregnant! Well, I know what I was thinking, I was thinking about the 5k increase to my salary that would help raise this child and the opportunity that could boost me into management in only 2-3 years. Yes, these are all awesome things, but dealing with all of this, while being pregnant is definitely not the best time of my life. My memory is so bad right now that it’s completely affecting me learning a new job. And believe me, if you use the wrong term or say the wrong thing, your employees will be the first to call you out on it. No, I am not a dumbass, I’m just pregnant, thank you. Oh and the confidence part is killing me. My boss tells me to have confidence when I speak with the director and the direct-reports, but it’s really hard to portray that when you have no idea what the hell you’re doing or talking about sometimes.

It’s also difficult to change the ways of 12 people who have been allowed to behave, work, act, talk, write pretty much any way they want over the course of the past few years. My biggest challenge is to motivate them to be the best that they can be, even if they have no aspirations of moving up in the company. How do you motivate someone to do their best if they don’t care if they do this job forever? How do you tell someone in their twenties that their grammar sucks in emails and they need to fix it so upper management doesn’t think we, as a department, are stupid? How do you get someone to treat you with respect and like you’re a supervisor? These, among millions of others, are my daily challenges, along with bosses and bosses-bosses, and bosses-bosses-bosses and being pregnant. When I don’t sleep well and I don’t feel well the last thing I want to deal with is all of this.

Home life is stressful too. There’s never enough hours in the weekend to clean the house (I can’t believe I want a bigger house in a couple of years, because without kids I can’t even maintain the one I have), to do laundry, to rest, to get outside and get some fresh air, to run millions of errands. And I don’t think my wonderful husband has quite caught onto the “I have to ask you to do it” vs “How can I help you out with that” technique. I’m concerned that when I’m 9 months pregnant I’m still going to have to ask for help cleaning or doing laundry instead of it just getting it done. Last time I checked no one asks me to do things, I just get up and do them. So I hope that currently he just feels like I’m still feeling well enough and mobile enough to continue these tasks on my own for now and that once I’m feeling like absolute crap, he’ll actually just do things without me asking. I also feel like a bump on a log. Last night I was so upset from work and so stressed out, what I would have done to just have a glass of wine so I could wind down, but I couldn’t, so I just laid down and watched TV. What a great wife I am these days…

Tummy is still growing. My round ligament pain is still pretty bad on my left side, but luckily I don’t get it daily. It’s just when I get it, I can barely walk until it calms down. Friday I turn 18 weeks so I’m going to start using that Prenatal Education System. It’s so loud, I have no idea how I’m going to use it at work once a day. I noticed a pillow masks the sound pretty well, so hopefully the two girls on either side of me won’t be able to really hear it. But since I have to do it twice daily, I have to use it once at work and once at home. Hopefully I can stick to it. Twice daily is a lot for someone on the run all of the time like me. And like I said, it’s really loud, so it’s not inconspicuous or anything haha.

I have these moments, mainly at night when I’m resting, where I just panic at the thought of this baby. Like I said above, I’m on the go so much and I’m so used to it. I wake up when I want to (kinda), I go to run errands, go to work, go to the movies, go on vacation, everything when I want to. It’s going to be so different having to schedule everything out a bit more and to “prepare” for outings and also think about if we can go to a place we want to go to. Obviously the movies will be a huge issue, we’ll need a babysitter, which we obviously don’t have haha. One of us will probably stay home for some errands to make it easier. I know that it’s like a switch that gets flipped once you have that baby in your arms, and you just suddenly have different priorities and things of importance, but I won’t lie and say it’s not a little scary. It’s even scarier since we’ll have no help. I was thinking that this will be my first birthday since I was a kid where I won’t get to celebrate with even a dinner. That’s fine, but just weird. I suppose that there’s a never ending list of things to be scared of, I mean you’re caring for another life, and I’m assuming it’s normal to be scared. I hope, lol.

Well I should get back to work. So far it’s a better day, but things didn’t get insane until this time yesterday, so we’ll see. I could use a quiet rest of the week.