In a way, it seemed like it would never get here, but yes. My last week of maternity leave is upon me. I have mixed feelings, of course, but not in the way you might thing. Maybe I’m just not like other women, but I did not spend my maternity leave cuddling with my baby boy the whole time. He is definitely cuddly, though — he is chubbier than Mikey was at this point, with tree trunk legs and super chub cheeks.

Christopher is now 4 months old. His coos have evolved into baby giggles every so often and he loves it when people talk to him. When he smiles, he’s got deep dimples on each cheek. And I just discovered today that he can roll from belly to back.

So if I wasn’t cuddling with him for the last four months, what have I been doing? Well, for the first eight weeks, I was recovering from major surgery. And I can sometimes still feel twinges of pain in the area of my incision. Most of this leave, however, I’ve been learning how to take care of not one, but two young children, be married, keep my house clean and stay sane. And next week, I’ll throw work into that mix. Oy.

I’m not even taking care of both of them at the same time, for the most part. We’ve kept Mikey in daycare four days a week because a) I definitely couldn’t handle two young kids by myself five days a week and b) we didn’t want to break Mike out of his routine too much. The two of them are a hoot, as you can see. And Mikey is learning at an amazing clip now, mooing and neighing and spontaneously identifying animals, letters and colors.

As I mentioned, I have mixed feelings about going back to work. On the one hand, I will be glad to go back to a routine where I have definitive breaks to my day and not have Christopher attached to ….a body part. Seriously, he is even refusing bottles now. On the other hand, I will miss bumming around at home, having the freedom to tinker around on my sites as I see fit and having the choice to take an afternoon nap with Chris (even though I usually don’t, much to Trinity’s chagrin). Then again, with my redesigns essentially done, I am beginning to feel some cabin fever. Yeah, it’s time to go back to work.