SAHM turned WAHM

Woo-whee!  It's been a busy few weeks.  If you've noticed, I've been a little absent around these parts and it's because... I'm working again.

Not that I wasn't working before, because trust me, chasing a toddler and tending a house IS work, but I'm talking about the paid type of work.  The kind of work where you perform a task and someone else pays you... in money.  It's a nice setup. 

The work I'm doing is super, SUPER part-time and 100% from home so basically, perfect for me and my situation and I'm doing the same work I was doing P.B. (pre-baby) as a hearing representative.  Although it's not at all a big time commitment (probably 1-3 hours per week depending on how many hearings I'm doing) I'm still trying to adjust to working something else into a day which already leaves me tired by the time evening rolls around.

Actually, this whole opportunity really just fell into my lap so I couldn't really refuse it because of how perfect it is for me.  A friend that I used to work with (not at the company that I worked at P.B., but the place BEFORE that.  Same industry though.) contacted me to let me know he had heard through the grapevine that a company was looking for someone to contract with to do just a couple of hearings here and there so he thought of me and gave them my name.  He put me in touch with the proper person and when we spoke, they loved me (naturally ;)  ) and so I'm working for them.  With them?  I guess I'm kind of working for myself as an Independent Contractor, yes?  Anyway, they're paying me and that's all that really matters, right?

I've been doing this for about 3 weeks now and I've been doing 1-2 hearings per week.  The way this process works is I set up a pre-hearing conference call to prepare the witnesses for the hearing (I usually try to schedule this the day before) and then we do the hearing (it's an administrative hearing conducted by telephone) at the scheduled hearing time.

The pre-hearing conference call can be scheduled whenever is convenient for all parties and so far, I've been able to get all of those completed during Jack's naptime (perfect!).  The only drawback is the hearings are scheduled anywhere from 8am-8pm.  Although a large portion of that time is either when Jack is sleeping or Mark is home from work to distract Jack while I'm busy, there is a portion of time where I may be on a very important call with a very persistent, and sometimes needy toddler nearby.

The good thing is that Jack's usually pretty happy playing on his own for spurts of time at this point.  The bad thing is, he's still a toddler who doesn't understand that the world (or at least my world) isn't always able to revolve around him.  I've done two hearings while he's been awake and the first hearing was a little trying because he couldn't quite figure out why I was out of the room for so long.  The second hearing went considerably better, so I'm hoping as we go along he'll just kind of catch on and allow me to be in another room for a bit.  Hearings are scheduled for 45 minutes typically.  So it's a decent stretch of time, however, he does play on his own for that much time anyway, but it's a little different being TOTALLY unavailable unless there's a REAL need for me, vs. I'm in the adjacent room and working on something as time allows, you know?  I'm hoping all will continue to go well and improve.

So far I'm actually pretty pleased with this whole situation.  Despite at times having to juggle a bit it's not a huge time commitment at all (let's face it,1-3 hours a week is pretty much nothing, but it is hard to HAVE to do something mid-day rather than just fitting things in around the house when I have a free moment) and it's fairly flexible.  Even though I wasn't looking for anything it's pretty perfect for me and it's nice being able to flex my brain a little bit again.  Going into this work again I felt like I remembered nothing, but thankfully it's all coming back very quickly!  It doesn't hurt that it's pretty easy money and they're paying me quite well.  We'll see how it goes, but I'm planning to stick with it at least for the time being.