*exhale*

First day back at work today felt suprisingly anticlimatic. Doesn't anyone know that the world is a completely different place??! Doesn't anyone *really* care?!?!

In all seriousness, I've been thinking about this day for 3 1/2 months, so I was ready. Not happy, but ready to take the plunge. Still very nervous though, so I'm surprised that I managed to get any sleep at all (although Peter reports that I tossed and turned all night long). Ellie got up to nurse at 4:20, after which I kind of fell back to sleep, to waken to my alarm at 5:10am. I guess this is my new reality. I took my precious time leaving and was out the house around 6:30 or so.

Walking into the building was surreal. Although people on the elevator and in the halls didn't know that this was my first day back, I felt like I was wearing a billboard screaming "Nervous, Slighty Sad, Totally Confused New Mama!" My boss said "good morning" to me like he would have any other morning. Very surreal. It was as though I had pressed the pause button on the rest of the building, had left for almost four months, and pressed restart. Life had gone on in my absense seamlessly.

The weirdest part was that although I've been un-pregnant know for almost four months, it was definitely a slight shock to my system to be un-pregnant at work. My identity for so long was "that pregnant chick," and because my department is 90% new people, no one knows me as anything but.

I definitely missed Ellie, but wasn't so sad that I couldn't focus. In fact, things went pretty good, which, when I realized this, made me miss her even more, as though there was some aspect in my life which she was not a part of. :( I so badly wanted to have her with me so I could look down to see her smile that I practically ran out of the office and sped home, so I could feel her baby weight rest in my arms. Despite my fast exit, I feel as though a weight has been lifted. We can do this. Our family can do this..