It’s been nearly a month into Hannah’s new job as a teaching assistant and it’s been, somewhat of an adjustment for her getting back into the working world. Sleeping earlier, eating later, and taking public transport on a daily basis are just some of the things she’s had to get used to. But funnily enough, I’ve had to make a few changes with her too which surprisingly haven’t been as easy as I thought they would be. We’ve both had to adjust our daily patterns in different ways and below are some of the biggest changes, in my opinion.

First of all, we go to be a lot earlier than we used to. 11PM or 23:00 (if you’re like me and prefer 24-hour times) was when we used to go to bed. Now, we’d be pushing it after half nine. Since both our days start at 06:20 our early bedtimes help us to get a decent amount of sleep, although we both haven’t cracked it yet and somehow wake up mid-sleep most nights.

The school Hannah works at is based in London Bridge which isn’t too far from where we live (about a 15-minute train journey), my place of work is a bit further away and the quickest route requires me to go to a different station than the one Hannah goes to. Nevertheless, I’ve opted to go the same route as Hannah taking two trains to work instead of one for a few reasons. One, Hannah doesn’t usually take public transport, if possible taking a car would be her preferred mode of transport which is understandable. Because of this, I wanted to accompany her the first few times just to ease any nerves and dispel any confusion. The second reason was to spend more time with her. Since we go to bed earlier than usual spend 2-3 fewer hours with each other in the evenings, so the 15 ish minutes I spend walking and being on the train with her don’t exactly make up for it but it’s better than nothing.

When Hannah was working from home she would take care of a lot of household chores, washing the dishes, cooking, keeping the house clean, which made sense. Now that she’s working outside of the house more of those responsibilities have fallen into me. This is not to say that it’s a bad thing, just that it’s different. There are more dishes in the sink than usual, more bits to pick up and wipe around the house. And I cook more around the house than I used to which gives Hannah a break if she’s had a long day at work.

This point is a bit of a continuation from the commute on because we sleep a lot earlier now we don’t really have any evening activities. We used to watch a TV series or play some games in the evening before bed, now we just eat, then sleep, maybe with some talking in-between. This makes our weekends more valuable to us.

We’re both super blessed for where we are in life and although this is a post talking somewhat negatively about the changes we’ve made we couldn’t be more grateful to our friends, family, and our saviour for it all.