Burn, Baby, Burn

I know I've been eating my vacation time in dribs and drabs, mostly thanks to various doctor appointments (mine or the kids'), so out of curiosity, I pulled up my spreadsheet with this year's timecard entries on it.

I started counting in March, because I didn't come back to work until February, and then I spent a lot of time out for the rest of that month trying to get daycare up to speed on Penny's care and doing those postnatal doctor visits that I won't have to worry about anymore.

So starting in March and going through the end of July -- that's just 1 day short of 22 weeks -- I clocked 27 hours of vacation time. That doesn't include the two full days I took off (I logged both of those as floating holidays, which is a different charge number). It doesn't include things like my chiropractor visits, which I schedule during lunch.

(It also, oddly enough, doesn't include any full or even half-days spent to staying home with sick kids. For a baby in daycare, Alex is almost shockingly healthy. KNOCK ON WOOD. And Penny's had an ear infection, but nothing to keep her home from school.)

It does include the half-day I took to get my iPhone, though. So if I subtract that out, that's almost precisely one hour every week. (It's an average, naturally. There were some weeks I took 3 or 4 hours, and a few -- very few -- that I didn't take any.)

One hour a week of vacation time, burned (mostly) sitting in doctor's offices. It doesn't sound like all that much, but if you spread it out over the year, that's 52 hours of "vacation" a year. That's well over a third of the vacation they give me. (No, my company doesn't have separate vacation and sick pools. I get 17 days of vacation a year -- 136 hours -- and if I use it all up going to the doctor, then tough.)

I was thinking about it because my mom reminded me the other day that we need to start firming up our plans for Christmas and make our reservations and let everyone know when we're traveling so they can make their plans. (Why yes, I do believe my parents are planning their Christmas around When The Grandkids Will Be Available. And why not?) And I noticed that Penny has a checkup scheduled with her endocrinologist the Monday before Christmas, which means we can't use that weekend to travel, and I was trying to decide how to arrange our trip to maximize time spent with family while minimizing time off from work because I know I've had this slow bleed of vacation time, and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder just how bad the bleed was, and maybe I should just work it into my mental budget.

There's 22 weeks (ish) left in this year. If I assume, then, that I will spend 22 hours (or so) on various doctor visits, then I can log into the HR website and have a much clearer estimate of how much vacation time I've got to spend.

Which doesn't stop my stressing over it or obsessing about it, but at least I have concrete number to worry with.