The Other Woman

Blogs are online journals but I primarly use our blog to share photos and videos so that people can keep up with Nate and his daily happenings from across the miles. However, today I am going to blog in the traditional sense.
Reader Beware: I have had very little sleep this week and I am fighting a sinus cold so I cannot promise anything about the quality of this post.

As a previous blog post indicated I am working again. Now let me get this straight; every mother is a working woman but some also work outside the home. My mother did not "work" when I grew up, but she worked and she worked hard! To any man who might read this: Never ask a mother if she works, ask her if she also works outside the home.
For the past month or so I have been leaning on family and friends to help take care of Nate while I would work from home or go into the office. I did not really have a childcare plan worked out. I am usually a planner but I just did not have a plan all set up and ready to go. So after a agonizing about what to do we decided to hire a nanny to come a few days a week. Elvia is Nate's new Nanny. She is great and she really seems to love Nate, which is the most important thing to me. When she first came I was working at home and then came the day that I had to leave and go into the office. I just assumed that it would be like the other days that I left Nate to go into work. However, it was completely different. When I left before I was handing Nate to my mother, Rob's mother, my sister, or a really close friend from church. These are my women, these are my people. I know that they love Nate and they would choose to spend time with him even if I did not have to leave. Elvia is someone I am hiring to love Nate in my absense. Somehow it made leaving him a little more real. That first day I went into the office I handed Nate over to her and got into my car. I was not expecting the tears that followed. I was not prepared, but I guess that are so many parts of motherhood that you can never prepare for. I came home to a happy baby and I knew that I was doing the right thing. This week I had to go into the office several days in a row and when Elvia came through the door one morning and I was happy to have some help since it was a very tiring week for me. Nate's face lit up with a huge smile when she spoke to him. Part of me felt so happy that he was connecting with her and a part of my heart sank because I realized that she is the other woman in his life.