Hmm. I found this draft in my folder today. It’s three weeks out of date, but should be posted anyway. I’ll follow it up with the resolution below.

Yesterday, I was two days away from handing in this staggeringly large project, a project twice as long as most, done within the same time frame. Except I lost four days at the beginning because HRH was away, so instead of meeting my 45-page quota, I did maybe 30 pages total before he got home, and so my daily quotas had to be reworked until I had to pull off crazy numbers per day.

In two weeks, both the kids will be back at school/preschool full time. (Or as full time as Owlet gets, who is actually part time, having Wednesdays off.) Yesterday, I was looking forward to racing to the end of this project, of handing it in, of having the last couple of weeks off with the kids, who have been struggling but handling things relatively well this past month with both of them home and me working full time.

And then yesterday, work contacted me, and asked if I could pick up another project as soon as I handed this one in. Two week deadline. Math, of all things.

I cried, a bit. Freelancing means working when there is work and socking away the money, because when there is no work there is no money coming in. Kids don’t understand that. Sparky burst into tears when I told him and had to close his bedroom door and wail for a while.

It has been a frustrating summer. Working full time at home with both kids off school is like taking your kids into work with you every day. Think about that. Everyone’s tempers are very short, there is lots of whining, and my productivity is taking a severe hit.

I had to take it. Work has happy — my copy chief said that I’d saved them, which was nice to hear, but wouldn’t mean much to my kids.

My kids rose to the occasion, though, and allowing them liberal movie time plus working at night and overtime on Labour Day weekend meant that everything turned out okay. I’d finished Sparky’s back-to-school shopping in July (allow me to pat myself on the back here) so that wasn’t an issue. I handed the math book in on time, and decided to book off a few days, because as much as a freelancer has to make hay while the sun shines, I have been going nonstop since May. Summer is the busy season in publishing, and I was handling enormous projects with lots of details. It’s nice to know I’m valued for these particular kinds of manuscripts, but I had three in a row, and I was, honestly, burnt out. I also need to prep a four-hour workshop for this coming Saturday at Sacred Cauldron, and with my reduced brain cells, there was no way I could juggle that plus a heavy assignment again. Fortunately, there’s a lull, so I haven’t had to formally book off.

One of the huge cheques from a crazy project I did in July came in, so I treated myself to some books and some fibre, as well as a pair of hand carders. The problem is, I’ve been going full-bore for so long that even though a lovely stack of books is waiting, I keep drifting around with a work hangover, vaguely thinking there is something with a deadline I need to do first.

We did it; we survived August, a crazy, crazy month, with me working full-time at home with both kids home full-time, too. I am putting money aside every paycheque now to make sure Sparky can go to camp next summer. Not that it will be as terrible, because Owlet won’t have a break from preschool like she did this summer because her daycare closed at the end of July and her slot in the new daycare didn’t open till after Labour Day; she goes straight through.