Feeling the pressure

I go back to work in 2 weeks.  TWO WEEKS!  Blurg.  I wish I felt differently but to be honest, I'm fighting back a rising panic and my anxiety levels are through the roof.  Paul has heard way too much preemptive whining on my part about how hard it is going to be.  I want to just enjoy this time and not freak out about how Clara will do in daycare, but the past two times I took her to the gym with me it was pretty rough.  As in, she cried so much that the staff came and got me off the treadmill both times because she wouldn't calm down.  Which at first seemed totally weird since I have been taking her to the gym on a regular basis since she was 6 weeks old and she never had any problems with it before.  But then, I know that she is reaching the stage where separation anxiety kicks in and that it is totally normal fo tiny tots to experience it and that she will be just fine.  Paul and I are going on our first childless date this Saturday (to our ward holiday dinner for adults only) and we have hired a babysitter, so we will see how that goes. 

The thing is, Clara doesn't cry.  Like, ever.  She fusses when she gets hungry but it never even comes close to a wail.  So when I have handed her over to friends recently and her little lower lip starts to quiver and her eyes fill with tears of betrayal, I seriously feel like the worst parent in the world.  What kind of monster am I that I would take the happiest baby ever and intentionally do something (like let somebody else hold her) that would make her sad?  I'm just praying that she gets over the anxiety quickly.

I find myself racing to complete projects in my remaining time off work:

• finish making Christmas presents for my nieces and nephews (why did I decide to hand sew the most darling elephants you've ever seen for each of them?  I should have just bought them each a book.)
• finish Christmas shopping for everybody else (I'm getting close to being done, thank goodness.  Paul and I love making lists of each person we are getting gifts for and writing our idea next to their names.  It is one of those little traditions that we have developed that has become one of my favorite things.)
• make a whole bunch of meals to put in the freezer for when I go back to work so I have one less thing to stress about (we just bought a stand-up freezer on Craigslist for our garage so that we have more space in our freezer, so if anybody has any good recipes or links to recipes that freeze well, please send them my way!  Especially if you have good crockpot meals where you can throw all the ingredients in a freezer bag so that I can just empty the bag into the crockpot as I am heading out the door for work.)
• finish making my blog books (I'm using Blurb to make books of all of my posts from previous years, which is something I have been wanting to do for a long time.  Turns out it is more time-consuming than I would have thought but I have to finish by November 30th so I can use my 20% off coupon.)

Then there are all the smaller things like cleaning the house, fulfilling my new calling (did I mention on here that I was just called to be the 2nd Counselor in Young Womens' in my ward?  Happy dance!), blogging, ordering Christmas cards, decorating for the holidays, straightening up the office, etc.  Gosh, I'm overwhelmed just thinking about all of it.  I keep making mental lists of all this stuff in my head and then remembering tasks that I forgot to add to the mental list and I know I am going to drop the ball somewhere and miss Clara's next doctor's appointment or leave the drycleaning at the cleaner's for a month or something. 

I actually sat down to write about our fun weekend and post cute photos but look what just spewed out.  And now Clara is awake so I need to feed her and then get ready super fast for 9:00 a.m. visiting teaching.  And Paul came back into the house and told me that his truck was vandalized last night (a section of pipe underneath his truck was cut off I guess - the same thing happened to one of our friends in Utah Paul says) and he needed to take my car to work today so I am without transportation.  Cute photos about fun times coming later I guess.

Heaven help me, today feels like it is going to be one of those days.