Vacation Day?

I get annoyed when people post more than once in one day.  But, such is the reality of us having a really busy and awesome weekend of Baby James 1st birthday and party, Aunt Pat's visit, Joel Husband's 34th birthday and Mother's Day.  Amidst all of this I took a vacation day.  Or did I?

It starts innocently enough, my iPhone gets my work email and it is next to impossible to not see the email come through.  Then I realize, I never set my out of office.  Uh, oh.  So, I log on and try to set out of office, but then three emails come through that need immediate response.  Ok, fine.  Then a voicemail on my cell, someone really wants to get something out.  Argh.

The next thing you know, this is me on the couch, but at least I had the cutest working partner next to me.  Clearly he had a lot of work to get done as well on his new laptop.  But seriously.  Then, as I saw my 92 year old visiting Aunt, and my one year old birthday baby boy, not to mention my parents, waiting to go to start our day (we went out to lunch and shopping in Exeter) it hit me that I really needed to stop.  But, I couldn't.  Prepare this report for Monday.  Even when I decided I was not going to get things done, this is my vacation day, dammit, I still needed to take the time to respond to people that no, I will get to that on Monday.

I kinda knew this was a possibility.  I was really prepared for this.  I prepped myself, and my boss, and pretty much everyone I work with and I continue to do so on a daily basis.  But the truth of the matter is, if I do not maintain a balance, there is no way I am going to survive.  So, this is why I cling to leaving the office each day at 4:30, no matter what.  I will work from home every Thursday, even if it means calling into a meeting that everyone else has travelled to my office for - because once you do one thing, it is all down hill from there.  Just like that one email that I thought couldn't hurt to look at at 8am on my vacation day, my baby's birthday, my Aunt Pat's visiting day, my VACATION DAY!

So, I did it.  I spent 5 hours working on my vacation day on Friday.  But, I will not be doing that again.  Yes I have been working nights, yes I will be doing work here and there on the weekends.  Yes, when times are crazy there will be some extra work...  but vacation is sacred, dammit!  There is no way I am logging that full vacation day...


PS - when not working... I spent the day in the Drs office with James and Joel separately, we were super-psyched to learn the day before 45 people were to come over that they both have pink eye and James another double ear infection.  Awesome!