Leaving Work

You may have seen on one of my previous posts that I have decided to leave work.  After 14 years working in IT (my most recent role being a Disaster Recovery Lead), I decided it was the right time for me to take some stress out of my life, focus on the kids and the house, and to give my husband opportunity to be more flexible with his job.

Over the past few years, both of our jobs have become more time consuming, meaning that the kids were having to go to afterschool and breakfast club more, and we were using our evening and weekends to either work some more, or to catchup on other stuff, like chores and more recently, blogging.

So when the opportunity came up to go for voluntary redundancy, I pondered for a while, change my mind quite a few times, then with total support from Chris, I decided to go for it!

I finished my last day in the office on Wednesday, and got to pick my kids up from school on their last day before their summer holidays 🙂  I’ve had a couple of days off now and it definitely hasn’t sunk in yet.  I am more relaxed though, my house is tidier and I’m totally enjoying having fun with the kids.

We got to go out for the day to a big country park and flower show on Thursday.  We wandered around in the sun, ate ice cream, rode the ferris wheel and played in the playground.  There was no ‘hurry up’, ‘come on, move along’ or ‘time to go, mummy’s got work to do’.  Just a chilled out day, which was followed the next day by a gorgeous bouquet from Chris to celebrate this next phase in our lives.

So what am I going to do next?

Well I’m looking forward to having lots more fun with the kids over summer (especially as Lewis starts reception class in September), getting a couple of holidays in, and then buckling down and spending some more time cooking for my blog.  Alongside that, I’ve started looking into some freelance work and writing the first few chapters of a novel (eek!).  I don’t have any plans to return to IT at this point, but I’ll see how it goes.  I’m not sure how well I’ll adjust to not going in the office everyday, managing a team and making decisions that impact more than me or my family.  I think cookies and cake will help though 🙂

So there we have it!

I’m a little scared, a lot excited and ready for a new challenge!