All good things must come to an end, even my 42-day stint out of work to recover from surgery and simultaneously celebrate the holidays. In fact, that wasn’t solely vacation; I didn’t work at all for a couple weeks after surgery, but starting on December 10 I worked from home a little bit until Christmas.

Alas, I said I’d return to work at the beginning of the new year, and the new year and the redemption of my promise inevitably arrived. On Thursday, January 2, I finally ran out of excuses and had to go back to work.

Over the course of Thursday and Friday, various coworkers came up and welcomed me back, said they missed me (or the jokeboard), and made me feel welcome. I appreciated it, and I do feel fresh and ready to dive back into work with new enthusiasm.

But I will miss some things about working (or not working) from home:

• Walking Benji to school every morning. I treasured the time we had to walk to school — usually. Sometimes he was grouchy and slow and it was like walking a porcupine to school. But other times we had interesting, open conversations and played fun number and word games, and I’ll miss those times.
• Taking naps and waking up without an alarm. Surprise! I sure did adapt easily to sleeping on my own schedule. Apparently that involved waking up at about 6:30 or 7:00 am (depending on when Benji woke up), taking a nap midafternoon, and going to bed around 10:00. Alas, when working, I’m waking up before 5:00 am (to fit in jogging — fortunately a temporary measure), staying awake all day, and going to bed between 8:30 and 9:00 pm. Most of all I think I’ll miss the naps.
• Wearing comfy pants. It’s not that I have to wear business attire at work; skirts and pantsuits aren’t on the menu. But I do wear more fashionable jeans (if there are such things), which means they’re tighter, which means more squeezing and chafing on my incision sites. Most of the time they don’t bother me, but by the end of the day on Thursday I was experiencing a dismaying amount of incision-area discomfort from said jeans.

Of course I’ll also miss the discretionary time, having flexibility to do laundry and dishes when I want, to make dinner before Ian gets home, play with Benji whenever I want, exercise when it’s handy… Yes, I did enjoy all those things, too. But really I’ll miss pants, naps, and walking to school.