Retrospective, Part III :-)

It wasn’t my intention to stop blogging after my return, even though my original motivation for starting the blog was to chronicle my experiences during my sabbatical. A funny thing happened, namely I had forgotten how busy and hectic things get during “normal life”. The return to normalcy was further accentuated by the Better Half putting her nail art classes into practice and opening her own shop in November.

This means she usually gets home around 8 or 9pm which further implies that yours truly picks up the kids from daycare, cooks dinner, plays with them, and gets them to bed. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind doing any of that; in fact, it’s actually really nice to be able to spend more time with the kids when they are still young. (We also wanted to put them in an English daycare and later to an English school to prepare for future sabbaticals and the only English daycare in our city is reachable only by car and the Better Half doesn’t drive, so no matter what, I’d be picking up the kids.) I also like cooking a lot and am not too bad at it, judging from the reactions of others when they eat my food, i.e., taking seconds, thirds, and asking for a doggy bag :-). It just means that there’s less time for work and other activities, since the number of hours in a day has not changed.

Better time management would certainly help and is something I’m working on (and have usually been very bad at…) but overall it’s just a matter of how you allocate your 24 hours per day. There just haven’t been that many hours for blogging recently. I do have a bunch of stuff I’d like to write about, but I need a bit of time to get those stories sorted out.

Anyway, so that is then the final lesson from a sabbatical. You will forget what “normal life” is like and things you used to be able to do during the sabbatical won’t anymore fit into your schedule. Next time, maybe I will be better prepared or less surprised at least.