A Working Mom's Trials & Rewards

Thursday, January 15, 2009

So in my first post this year I mentioned that work has been crazy busy. Well it has and it's been a real struggle for me. I desparately want to be able to stay home with Sadie and all I find is that work continues to pull me away from home.

The past couple of weeks has been more my fault than anything though. Economic times being what they are I've taken advantage of getting some much needed overtime. Well it's much needed in two different ways really. Let me explain...

....when I came back to work from maternity leave, I was offered a position in our Real Estate department, helping to manage our commercial properties. We have a few plazas that we manage. I thought great! It's a change in pace, a SMALL (and I mean SMALL) pay raise, but it's something new and I've managed properties before. Ok one time before I was assistant manager of a 240 unit apartment complex back in 1998 when I moved to Bakersfield. Anyway, I thought it would be a great opportunity. I talked it over with Steve and I prayed about it, and I accepted the position. Things were going smoothly until October.

The company I work for, MS Walker & Associates, has many different sister companies. One of them owns a 32 unit townhome complex. Before I left on Maternity leave, they hired our IT Assistant to be the property manager. I knew then that things would not work out but I didn't think it would affect me since at the time I had nothing to do with the Real Estate Department. Hindsight is 20/20 they say. Well my foresight was dead on! In October I was given the duty to take over as manager on the property. We hired a family member of a fellow employee (always a bad idea) to be the resident manager while I handled the more office type duties. Well everything was awful. Nothing was organized. Things weren't being done correctly and I had to come in and clean everything up. So work has been a constant headache since October.

Well to make matters worse a few weeks ago the resident manager onsite started working more hours at her other part time job since her fiance got laid off. So guess what?! Tammy has had to pull double duty. This including all of my other properties and taking on more of an accounting role. Compensation you say?! HA! nothing but mileage which is at least something. However they are trying to get me on salary so I can have my own company laptop and the ability to work from home if needed. I just hope that I at least get compensated for the extra time I'm putting in when I go to salary. I'm sure things will work out but in a nutshell this has been my life the past month.

So Steve being the sweet and awesome husband that he is, knew I've been stressed out at work and pull 9-10 hour days trying to get everything done, so he took some great pictures of Sadie for me.

I've been so hard on myself lately. I have been trying to cut things out here and there and even changed our grocery shopping habits. All in an attempt to get to where we can rely on Steve's paycheck alone. So far we've done really good but it's still not quite enough. So we are going to get rid of our direct TV. Now all of you who know me and Steve know we love our TIVO and sports. But it's a sacrifice we are willing to give up in the hopes of saving some money. And never fear we are going to sign back up for Netflixs so we can keep up with our TV shows.

Now I do want to put a disclaimer out there, we will be signing up for AT&T Uverse which will save us money too when it gets to our area, but until it does we will at least save $60-70 dollars a month. Steve is a good man but he can't live without sports. We are going to get antenna so we can get local channels, but by next football season we will more than likely have some type of cable so he can have ESPN and NFL Channel.