Family Scheduling Changes

              

Saturday brought the end of my daughter's baseball schedule.  As a pre-schooler, this was her first experience with an organized sport, as well as our first experience dealing with a child's sports schedule.  To increase the scheduling difficulty, my husband was also the coach of her team. 

It was an great season, and it was amazing to see how well the children (ages 4-6) advanced their skill sets, and teamwork in a matter of weeks!!  The scheduling aspect of it was a struggle, rushing from work to pick up my kids from daycare, and make it to the field in time for practice on Wednesday nights, and they had games every Saturday morning (weather permitting).  Selfishly, I enjoyed the social aspect of her baseball commitments.  It gave me a chance to get to know the parents of many of her classmates on a more personal level, and that's the part that I'm going to miss the most.  However, for the rest of the summer it will be nice to have my Saturday mornings free again!

We have more scheduling changes on the horizon though, and we have been actively working on finding a resolution that will work for our entire family at the end of the summer.  At the end of August our daughter will start kindergarten full time.  I've been in contact with the school to determine what the bus schedule would be for her for next year.  We hadn't initially planned on having her ride the bus, but in order to get our son to daycare, and ourselves to work on time, it will work out better to have her ride the bus to and from school.

I've requested a change in my work hours with my employer, and I'm very fortunate that they were willing to be flexible.  My husband is also having to change his hours in order to accommodate our kindergartner's schedule.  At the end of the summer, my husband will start work later, allowing him to be home in the morning to put our daughter on the school bus.  He'll then take our son to daycare, and go into the office.  In the meantime, I've changed my schedule in the opposite manner.  I'll go into work earlier, pick our son up from daycare earlier, and be home in time to get our daughter off the school bus.  These changes mean that I likely won't see the children in the morning, since they'll still be sleeping when I leave for work, and my husband in turn will get home later than he does now. 

Financially it makes sense, since we won't need to have our daughter in daycare at all anymore.  The downside being that we're sacrificing family time to achieve that.  My husband will have time alone with both children in the morning, and I will have time alone with them in the afternoon, but our hours together as an entire family will be reduced. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to find a happy balance within this schedule, at least until next fall when our son starts pre-school and everything changes again!