Feeling guilty, but only a little

I've been training a new person at work for the past couple days. She flew out from LA, so it seemed only fair that I would move my workdays around to be there for two days straight in order to spend more time with her. Plus, the result was a Friday off from work, and that's never really a bad thing. Throw in that my daycare lady offered to keep the girls today as well as the two days earlier this week since there was a day last week that I paid for but didn't use, and I have a very pleasant Friday ahead of me.

On the downside there's the "But I don't want to go to daycare today, Mommy. I want to stay home with you!" that I got to hear yesterday AND today. There's the general guilt of not taking advantage of every possible opportunity to spend time with my girls on days I don't have to be at work. There's the 45 minutes I spent at a coffee shop reading a book before heading to the grocery store this morning that was pure luxury (okay, so it was actually a donut shop that happens to sell coffee). The result is an underlying layer of guilt over taking the day for myself. One of the reasons I set up my work schedule the way I did was so that the girls would only have to be in daycare every other day, or for two days in a row if, for some reason, I had to rearrange things one week. So to send them for a third day straight, immediately following a week of being with them non-stop (read: spoiling them with my presence), goes against that in a big way.

BUT... we have the weekend ahead of us to enjoy as a family. We have even more time together this weekend because I've already done the shopping that usually happens on Saturday. We have piles of clean laundry instead of the usual dirty ones (and they'll even be folded soon, I swear!). We have a clean bathroom, and if I'm on a roll, we'll end up with some other clean rooms as well. We'll even have a jump start on sanding a bunch of lumber in the garage to repair the trim on the house if I manage to get to that this afternoon as I hope to. So yes, I'm taking a day "for myself", but it's not like I'm out spending the day at the spa. I might be, if we could afford it... but for today I took the me-time to enjoy my favorite food and a good book, and then I'll accomplish a lot of things that will result in my being a better and more attentive mother over the weekend. There. I've talked myself right out of those guilty feelings!

(Truly, I feel very little real guilt about the whole situation, but you know how it goes when you have a beautiful little girl begging to stay home with you... it makes it hard not to hear that voice in your head saying "but just this once, you could have let her!")