Making money vs time lost with family ? Early Retirement Extreme ...

Background:

1. I earn 2/3 of income in the household.
2. We could live off my husband's wages, but would not be saving much, if anything. (Daycare comes out of my wages and would be nil if I was at home.)
3. Our house is paid in full.

My problem:

I have returned to work after being off for 17 months and I'm having a hard time adjusting to being somewhere doing something I find redundant or useless. Nothing has changed at all. (I find that horribly depressing since I work in IT and you would think something has happened in that time.)

Most of all, I miss my son. I miss puttering around the house, fixing it up, cooking us good food, having time to sit down and eat together when my husband comes home. You know, all that good stuff. And selfishly, I miss having some free time and even more importantly, the time to get a good night's sleep.

Since I've returned, everyone is over tired, stressed and cranky (myself included). Rates of eating junk has gone up for us, and the quality of my son's sleep (and mood) has gone down because he just doesn't sleep that well at daycare.

Emotionally, I would quit this job in a second and stay home where I feel I'm needed the most. Financially, it makes more sense for me to work and bring home the "buckets of diamonds" (as one poster put it), save for five years, and then I am ERE. (Husband said he wants to work "for a long while.")

In the end I can't decide if staying home with my son when he is little and taking care of my family first is worth the lifetime of lost wages. I will never find a job that pays me this much money with these kinds of benefits if I quit and I doubt they would hire me back in five years when my son starts school full time. I've also tried to negotiate part time or a leave of absence, both denied.

Questions:

1. If you have been in this situation, what did you do?

2. What are some questions I can ask myself to try to figure out what I should do?

Source: http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/topic.php?id=2841

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