My journey as a stay at home mom!

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that someday, any day would I be a stay at home Mom!  I never had a clear plan about what I wanted to do, but definitely I wanted a career I could enjoy.  Fast forward to my moving to Milwaukee in 2000 and meeting my husband Dan ( a Milwaukee Firefighter ) and getting married in 2004.  When I first moved here I worked in customer service at a paper company, which I enjoyed, but I really wanted to go to school.  I settled on Nursing as I wanted to do something that would have stability and decent pay......I forgot that I am not big on touching people!
Just days before starting clinicals, I switched programs in a panic and decided to become a lab technician.  It was a good choice for me, as I love the science involved.  So I finished school and got a job as a full-time lab technician in Kenosha.  The work was interesting and I loved the people there, but during my school and clinicals, I had gotten married, pregnant and had Elise. 
The cost of daycare was so outrageous that I had to cut my hours in half and work a schedule opposite Dan.  We ended up being off together maybe 3 times per month, but we worked it out.  Then along came Nathan.  No one told me that going from one to two kids would be ten times harder!!!  So we decided that I would go down to working an as needed schedule, which pittered out to just not working at all.  All of the sudden I was a stay at home Mom! 
I had all these images of peaceful days of cooking and baking and cleaning.....Nope, Nathan never let me put him down, the house stayed messy, the laundry piled up and we ate a lot of Mcdonalds!  I struggled with guilt of wasting my degree every single day.  I felt guilty that we had student loans, and no money but my husband income.  I worry that I will never be able to get into the lab again after so many years of being away from it.  I still worry about these things.  So in 2009 I was staring to look for a part-time position again and whoops an unexpected little surprise hit us around Christmas that year.....That surprise turned out to be Gavin!
So now I have a 5 year old, 3 year old and a 6 month old, and after 2 1/2 years of staying home, it is finally starting to feel like it's OK for me to be "wasting" my degree because I am giving my children stability (which is tough when Daddy works 24 hour shifts and weekends and holidays) and I'm giving them love.
So I thought it would be fun to start a blog about things we do to make ends meet on one income or even two, and the challenges of parenting children when sometimes I still feel like a kid myself.