Lunch Break

I have hinted here, and stated obviously and repeatedly on Facebook, that Chris has worked a lot of overtime in the last few weeks. This has been a lot more stressful to our family than I really noticed in the beginning. Chris generally works 40 hours a week, 10 hours each Monday through Thursday, Fridays off. In four weeks, Chris worked 65 hours of overtime, meaning he averaged 56 hours each week. He almost doubled that last week by working 83 hours in six days--43 hours just in overtime. He most often came home around 10:30 or 11:00.

On the worst night, he didn't get home until 2:30 in the morning. No joke.

On the best night, he came home at 6:15. We girls were pretty excited about it. Jane and Megan very much enjoyed just being with Dad. I could tell they missed him, even if they didn't realize it enough to say it themselves.

I was surprised at how refreshing it was for me to see my kids with their dad. Too little of that going on lately. Even though he was home, he spent 30 minutes sleeping while I got dinner, then we had about an hour and a half with him before the kids went to bed (including dinner), then he was back on his computer working for another two hours before we went to bed.

It was a long week.

The oft-asked question, naturally, is WHY is he working so much?? To be followed closely by When will he be done?

In layman's terms--because that's all I have any understanding of--he's testing. They have software that is going to be released and it's Chris and his team's job to make sure the programs actually work. They run literally hundreds of tests to find all bugs and defects, then they have to fix them and test again.

So, that's a big project anyway. Add to that the fact that they are testing three different programs at the same time and the fact that Chris is in charge of organizing and coordinating the teams running the tests and collaborating with the programmers who fix the bigger bugs. Chris is also one of the few guys who actually really knows what the tests all are, so he's one of the go-to guys when problems come up that are harder to figure out. Physically exhausting to work that many hours with little sleep and often not quite enough food and mentally exhausting to be actively problem-solving for most of those hours.

(P.S. Sorry, Chris, if I've totally misrepresented what you've been doing. I tried to get it right...)

The big push last week was to get the testing all squared away, so every test passed, before Butch came this week. Butch is witnessing each and every test to make sure it passes. That's what's going on this week. Chris is there basically overseeing all the tests while his team runs them and Butch records. By the end of the day yesterday, he already had 28 hours on his timecard for the week, and it was only Tuesday. But, there is an end in sight--Butch is only here this week. We've got our fingers crossed that the week will end on Friday instead of Saturday, but it certainly won't go past that. Yay!

We did take advantage of my stay-at-home-mom-ness yesterday and packed up a picnic lunch, stole Chris away from the office, and spent 45 minutes together at a park just up the road. Eating and playing with Dad was just the ticket for a very, very good lunch break.

Convenient that the park was close, eh?

Just a side note milestone, Ben has already discovered his hands. He will stare intently at them until he goes cross-eyed, then work as hard as he can to get them both shoved in his mouth at the same time. That's skills, dude.

He also slept through the night for the first time last night--seven hours of unconscious bliss. Here's to many, many more nights like that, baby.

I'm pretty lucky to have such a good husband and adorable kids. I must have done something right...