Lucky......

So it's now finally official, I am a Stay at Home Mother.

I'm feeling incredibly lucky this week as I sit down and reflect over the last year and the changes that have happened - all of which for the better.

For 12 years I worked in a job that went from something that I absolutely loved to the complete opposite. 

I wasn't enjoying it anymore and I didn't have the work life balance that my employers insisted that they were providing.

I'm a great believer that things happen for a reason and I firmly believe that this is the path that was meant for me. 

Lots of people would look at redundancy as a daunting and worrying situation and it can be what with financial pressures and the fear of not getting further employment but I'm in a really good place in my life and I saw it as an opportunity.

An opportunity to try new things and more importantly to spend time with my family. It's not to say that I'm never going to work again, I will but for now I'm putting my family first.

Suddenly a months salary has never looked so attractive, we now manage our household on a strict budget but when my daughter told me she loves coming home to find me and her brothers here instead of an empty house it makes me feel incredibly lucky.

My job afforded me a great lifestyle and I am lucky to have been able to travel to many nice places on the back of it, have a nice car, buy nice things, have some savings and ultimately buy our home.

But at the end of the day when you have a family you realise that being together and spending quality time together is far more important than materialistic things.

Many times myself and my husband missed out on school plays, concerts, parades because of work. We had to send one of my parents or sometimes nobody was able to go in our place.

 In my work it was becoming increasingly difficult to get holidays around the children's school holidays, so we were missing out on each others lives.

These are some of the sacrifices we had to make because there was and still are bills to pay and food to put on the table. That's not going to change the bills are still there but we can manage and are managing so far.

It doesn't always seem fair but that's what working parents have to deal with to make a living and provide for their family but it was only last year when I started to feel incredibly guilty about things that we were missing out on. I think maybe it was hormones and I really feel that my prayers were answered this time round.

Over the last week I have spent some lovely time with my children with them being off on Easter Holidays. We've been out and about and just chilling at home. I'm grateful that I don't have to get them out of bed at the break of dawn and trot them off to a babysitter whilst I head off to work for the past two weeks.

I realise how lucky I am to be able to spend this precious time with my family for now. 
And don't get me wrong we aren't The Walton's. 
We have our ups and downs as well but we deal with it because that's what families do and it's not the end of the world if things go wrong or we stumble across a few obstacles from time to time. 

What the future holds nobody can tell but I'm as happy as Larry right now, whoever he is and I wouldn't swap this feeling for anything else in the world!!