Days 8 & 9: Study a Go Go

The past two days have been difficult. It is a snowy Saturday and my day from 4:30 am until now (7:30 pm) has been filled with my 2-year-old “GoGo” and just a bit of housework I could fit in…even now I am adding this post from my cell phone while my daughter sits in time out for purposefully making puddles of chocolate milk on our ottoman.

How am I going to do this? Between my regular job and being a mom to a loving and energetic toddler, how can I fit in the time to study and do the reading that I need to do?

Something’s gotta give – I’ve asked my husband to see if his dad can come and stay with us for a while to help with Margaux while I study. I’m afraid this makes me seem selfish and like a bad mother, but I know that just having at minimum 2-4 hours of study time on the weekends would go a long way for me at this point.

I have ordered some more of the required literature and praying for more time to read it.

Day 3: No Reading, But Still Progress

This day was not meant to allow me the time to do much reading for the CAE. However, progress was made in that I heard from another person about working in a study group and I received more good advice through this blog and a few emails I received from association friends. The YAPstars and uber-association geeks like me are definitely helping me with all the kind words.

The good news is that I figured out a way to get myself time to study on Saturdays! I usually take my daughter to Gymboree class on Saturdays. At the age of two, she is still clingy and very much attached to me every second I am around her. It is excruciating for me to pull myself away and go to another location to study. However, I got to thinking that my husband could take a role (just for a few months) in taking her to the class while I worked on my CAE materials. That would free me up for 2-3 hours on Saturdays (depending on if he did grocery shopping afterwards or not) and then I could do a 2-3 hour coffee break away from the house on Sundays.

I would love to take the Immersion Course, but the money is my holdup. I’m still debating about what to do with that.I may approach my boss for support (if you’re reading this, Dave, … hi!) or I may try to add a few makeup jobs to try to scrape together the funds. I think the comments here were pretty direct in saying that it would be the ideal direction for my preparation to take… and to make sure I have a good study group.

I feel a little guilty that I didn’t get any reading done today, but I might still read a little before I go to sleep tonight. This week is all about Domain 1 and so I still have plenty of reading to do. Tomorrow is my daughter’s birthday party so I’ve been posting pictures of her birthday cake to Facebook and doing prep work for that since I got home at 7. But maybe if I just crack open the book for 30 minutes…

Thanks again for all of the great tips and advice here and on my Acronym Soup blog! I’ve been learning A LOT from the comments and the supportive messages are heartwarming.