Jan Babcock, RN, worked Sunday and gave birth to a son the following Wednesday. Twelve weeks later, she was back at work, answering for the fifth time the question that working mothers everywhere face: resume a career or stay home to rear children?

"I worked only for a couple of weeks and decided that wasn't for me," Babcock said. Since then she's been a full-time mother to Taylor, 2, and Michael, 1.

Giving up a paycheck, of course, figures heavily in the decision to suspend a career, but a promotion for Babcock's husband and a move to Sugarland, Texas, outside of Houston, erased that from her equation.

What was left was a realization that she had just turned 40, had been in nursing for 20 years and that circumstances had demanded a different choice with her first family: three children from a marriage that ended in divorce.

"I missed it all with my first children," Babcock said. "They were raised in day care centers. And they were raised with baby sitters in the evening," as she worked double shifts in one nursing department, then with three nursing agencies on the side to support the children.

Babcock said that her RN friends and colleagues in the telemetry unit where she worked at Shawnee Mission Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., all said they'd jump at the chance to stay home with their children.

So she did.

"It's not what I expected," Babcock said. "Put it this way: It's not sitting at home on the sofa eating bonbons and watching soap operas, that's for sure. It's a time-consuming, full-time job," not unlike nursing.

Both jobs-RN and mother-cast Babcock as caregiver, teacher and a woman of patience. She swapped the physical and emotional needs of the ill and injured for the care and feeding of toddlers.

Instead of teaching patients about their conditions and treatment, she's reading the children stories and building towers and railroads.

"We work on numbers and letters and the cognitive kinds of things like sharing and building their emotional stature," Babcock said. "My gosh, I've even learned about Thomas the Tank Engine and friends."

The nature of stress is different, too. It's one thing to maintain composure with an understandably cranky patient, deal with a death or to see a steady stream of hospital admissions when it seems that caring for existing patients is all you can do. But try a tube of supposedly kid-friendly green yogurt squeezed onto light beige carpet and keeping up with dishes, laundry and taking out the trash.

"I will always cherish the moments that I've had with the children, one-on-one with them," Babcock said. "It's really given me insight into how important it is to be able to raise children in today's society and give them a good opportunity. I think I gave them a good start on life being home with them."

Having said that, Babcock soon is headed back to nursing, probably in a telemetry unit, where she has 10 years' experience, or in something involving children, she said. It's a matter of renewing her advanced cardiac life support and CPR certifications and applying for her Texas license.

For some, nursing may be like riding a bicycle: You never forget, Babcock said. Nonetheless, "you have to pedal and push your foot to make that bicycle go. In other words, you have to attend continuing education classes, do your research and keep up to date," she said.

Babcock said she's kept up with the change through the Internet during her year off from nursing.

"I miss nursing desperately, the socialization with friends and co-workers, and I miss my grandmas and grandpas that I take care of," Babcock said.

"I feel fortunate in the fact that I've have been there to see babies take their first breath, and I've been there standing beside the little lady, holding her hand and watching her take her last breath," she said.

"That gives me chills when I say that because I take my job real personally. It's not just a job and a dollar figure."

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.