Happy Labor Day! I’m happy to finally have some time to write for my blog again! This summer has flown by – I feel like I blinked and it’s over. I think it flew by quicker than normal for me because I was so busy all summer. I took several trips traveling for work throughout the summer. In early July, my family took a vacation together. During our vacation I learned how well my son can dance when he showed off his moves at my cousin’s wedding. We also got to go to the beach. I think the waves were a little intimidating for my son, but he loved being in the sun and playing in the sand.

The life of the party at my cousin’s wedding

Later in July we had some family come visit us and my son turned two! We had a fun pool party for him at home. During all the summer fun, I was busier than ever at work. Every year business planning (my most labor intensive time at work) always happens over the summer months. Of course this is the time of year I’d like to be least busy with work so I can go on vacations, spend time with family and enjoy the weather and sun. But I spent most of the summer working way more than my usual part-time hours just trying to keep my head above water.

Business planning is especially busy because there are hard deadlines that can’t be missed. I am the only reservoir engineer for my basin, so there is no one to step in if I’m behind in getting the work done. In order to meet the deadlines I always end up working extra hours. On days I worked a home during the month of July, I would wake up early and work before my son woke up, I worked during his independent play time, during his naps, and after he went to bed at night. I had no free time for myself all month.

Because of the long work days, I found myself getting very burnt out and bitter. It’s the time of year I start to wonder if I’m in the right profession, if I should have just been a stay at home mom, if I’ve made all the wrong life choices up to this point…but it only lasts about three months. Then I go back to my normal work hours and the job is more routine again. And during the other nine months of the year I really enjoy my work, so I try to remind myself that whenever I start to get worked up during business planning time. But it usually doesn’t make me feel any better about the situation when I am swamped at work, haha.

Another reason work has kept me busy is the company I worked for was bought out by a much larger company. For the last few months there have been a lot of changes, transitions, trainings, etc in our office. It has been stressful to say the least, but I am grateful that my husband and I both received job offers for our same positions with the new company. That job security has meant a lot for my peace of mind, which is much-needed right now because we have baby #2 on the way! I’ll share more about the pregnancy in my next post.

The company transition prevented much of the pre-planning and work I like to do in advance of the business planning cycle to try to reduce the workload right around the deadlines. In previous years I would start work as early as April to prepare for business plan, but this year I couldn’t start until the end of June. Losing those months of pre-work time really set me back and made for a busy July and August for me.

How was your summer? Do you have a times when work is busier than others? What do you do to prepare for/deal with the busy times at work?