What Monday will bring

Monday will bring pulling sleepy boys out of bed to take John to work between 7-8am. The remainder of the morning will be spent dressing and feeding myself and my children, doing dishes, and prepping dinner for that evening, even though I won't be home to eat it.
Around 12:30, I'll take Nathan to a neighbor's house for babysitting while I parent help in Aiden's preschool class for three hours.
At 3:45, I'll drag Aiden out of his classroom to the car (this happens all the time, as he never wants to leave). I will pick up Nathan from the babysitter's, drive to John's work, pick him up, and drive home. I will rush everyone into our home, rapidly change my messy parent-help clothes to work clothes, and then run out the door for my first day at work.
I begin at 4:45pm, a little earlier than I will normally start, only because I have some additional training videos to watch. I will work until 9:15pm and then I will get to go home to my husband, who will have put the children to bed all on his own. If I'm lucky, I will have gotten a snack in before my shift started, but I won't eat dinner until 9:45. I will then shower and collapse into bed by 11pm.
Total hours awake: 16.

I'm honestly not trying to be downer by typing all this out - it's my way of mentally going through what my first day of being a working mom will be. Mentally preparing myself, if you will. If I don't go through it all, I'll feel totally out of control of the day. I'm not going to lie and say I'll feel supercharged by the time I get home from work. Monday is going to be exhausting. For some reason, parent helping is one of the most draining experiences I have all month (twice a month). But really, I'm not dreading the parent helping or my first shift at work. I'm just not looking forward to the time between 3:45 and 4:45, where I'm trying to fit more things in than can probably realistically happen. But, I'm trying to be extremely prepared for this day, so I have a backup plan. If I don't have time to get John and the boys home so I can change before I need to be at work, I'll pick John up from work and then he'll drive me straight to work (I'll have a change of work clothes with me just for this reason). This will mean keeping the boys up for an extra hour or so, as he'll need to pick me up from work at 9:15, but they deal with occasional extra time awake fairly well.

Another thing that Monday will bring that won't add extra time, but is still a huge thing: We turn in Aiden's registration papers for his class for next year. He'll be old enough to go into the Multi-Age Preschool class (3-5 year olds), which will up the amount of time he spends at school next year. We have to three choices for classes and we'll find out on Wednesday if we are placed with our first, second, or third choice for class. I would like our first choice, as it keeps him in the afternoon and it would give him an extra day a week at school. Our second choices aren't bad, but they are both in the morning and that would require getting John to work earlier than normal to get Aiden to school by 9am. One choice gives him an extra day a week and the other gives him an extra hour on the two days he would spend at school. Oh well, I have no real control over what we get and really, school is school to him and that's all that matters.

Well, Monday will be a big day, but then I don't work again until Friday, so I suppose I have most of the week to recuperate. I'll keep you updated as to how my first day of employment goes.