The Good and the Bad

I was going to just write about the good today and the bad tomorrow, but that plan made this post sound too Pollyannaish so I'm doing it all in one.

The good is that I have a wonderful husband I still love after 10 years of marriage, two healthy children, and a job I enjoy almost every day. That is a lot and I know it. I do think I generally have the ability to see the positives in life, despite a grass is greener tendency that has gotten me in trouble more than once.

My girls are quite simply wonderful. I look at them and I see incredible love, intelligence, and beauty. The quality in Maddie that I value the most and try my best to encourage is her kindness and empathy for others. Even when she was 4 years old she was able to recognize when a girl in her class was being bullied by another, and brave enough to tell the bully that she wasn't acting very nice. True story - heard it straight from the teacher. Elizabeth is such a love bug - she tells me every day, sometimes several times a day, how much she loves me, how when she was an angel in heaven she asked God to give her to us, etc. I am blessed to be their mother.

My husband is a funny, hugely smart guy, and we're well matched personality wise. He has had a lot of depression and anxiety issues for as long as I've known him, and is not working now. He is a stay at home dad to our two daughters and is starting a graduate program in Chemistry in the fall. That program should yield him a Masters degree within a year and a half or so, and I am hoping so hard that he can find a good job that he enjoys when he's done.

That brings me to the bad: money. We never have enough. As I said, I have a good job I love, but Dave hasn't worked in a very long time, and between the two of us we have more student loans than most people have in a mortgage (and we've got one of those too). The day to day is usually okay, but we don't have nearly enough saved for retirement, college for the kids, or emergency savings. Suze Orman would tar and feather us! It's very depressing, so I'm going to stop talking about it now.

Next time I'll write about my job and why I like it.

Testing, testing. Feeling a little dumb doing this, but I figured I read enough blogs, why not try my hand at writing one? Yeah, me and 8 million others - I'm really original. BUT! I can spell and I do have decent grammar, so I've got that going for me (and you, incidentally).

So, the first post. Thinking, thinking...oh, here's one: my kids' school pisses me off. They don't tell anybody when Meet the Teacher Day (or, as we call it around these parts, Book Day) is until a week or two before it occurs. Because, of course, we're all just sitting around with nothing to do and no plans to make until the school tells us when we need to be there. I, for one, work full time and travel fairly frequently, so unless I know for sure when it is, there's a decent chance I won't be there. And that would suck, because I love that day! I have since I was a little girl. There's nothing like the feeling of newness and possibility that comes with starting a new school year, and I get excited for my daughters every time it comes around for them.

Okay, that's all I've got for the first one. We'll see if this lasts.