Foggy

I had the most amazingly productive day yesterday, and I was looking forward to a repeat today. But Pete woke up at 3:30 this morning and somehow we never really settled down again. Joe crawled into bed with us about an hour later after a nightmare, and an hour after that I decided attempting to get back to sleep was futile. In my non-pregnant state I never have trouble sleeping. Maybe two or three times a year it will take me half an hour to fall asleep, but that's it. Not so in pregnancy, when the least disruption will keep me awake for an hour or more. Pete is sleeping now and I am (was, I guess) trying, fuzzily, to write about a syntactic measure that I don't really understand.

I am also trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I hold four professional credentials at the moment: one from my professional organization, one from the state licensing board, one from the state early intervention office, and one from the International Board of Lactation Consultant Examiners. The trouble is the time and money required to maintain them. Is it worth it? Am I going to be able to find an academic job that works for my family, or do I need to keep the door open so I can work in a clinical setting? The first two credentials I will keep up for the foreseeable future, but the other two will need to be renewed next summer/fall.

My EI job is finished now; the last little one on my caseload aged out earlier this month (and did not qualify for school services, which is a travesty but also another story). I'm glad I had that job for eighteen months, but it clarified for me that I don't want to be doing clinical work for the long haul. I talked to the EI people today about my options -- is there an inactive status? What happens if I don't renew? They told me, and I asked the woman to clarify so many times that she checked with someone else to confirm that her understanding was correct, that it should be straightforward for me to renew after a few years if I let the credential lapse. This is in such stark contrast to renewing a lapsed state license (a mistake I will never make again) that I couldn't quite believe it. But in general the EI office has been much easier to work with than the state licensing office, so maybe it's even true. I think I'll probably let that one go for now.

That leaves the LC credential, which I am probably proudest of but which does not earn me a dime at the moment. Should I pay to maintain it? Still have to decide. I should add that to my monster list of things to do, to submit a portfolio to IBLCE for review so I can count my PhD coursework and research toward my continuing education requirement.

Sleep deprivation makes me rambly and boring, I'm afraid, but I'm going to hit publish anyway. Career advice welcome. :-)