Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all of our friends and family! As for us, we rang in the New Year with the stomach flu. It wasn't a very exciting evening except for the fact that 2011 faded away as 2012 waltzed in and took center stage. It has been a while since I have posted here and that is mostly due to the fact that 2011 was a year of major transition for us. One year ago at this time, I was pretty depressed, unemployed with no job prospects on the horizon. Trent was in his first week of a terrible delivery job that he hated and we had decided to move in with my mom as a precursor to losing our home as a result of our both having been unemployed for extended periods of time.

Today, I have a good job with a company that offers free tuition for employees, and I am enrolled in a Master's in Mental Health Counseling at Argosy University. Trent has a new job working as a mechanic for the Town of Gilbert, he works day shift, loves the work environment and to top it off, makes more money than he ever did at the City of Mesa. Delaney is excelling in school as a high school junior and is considering a wide variety of college majors before she heads off to college in a year and a half, Mia is doing a great job in kindergarten and Bodhi is adapting well to being in daycare full time. We are still living with my mom, but are working on building up our savings so we are well-prepared when we move out.

In short, we have experienced a lot in this past year and I am thrilled to see a new year come in and take over. I think we are in for a lot of change in 2012 but everything seems to be looking up for us and I couldn't be more excited!

Back Again . . . It's Been a While

It's been almost a year since I last posted a blog entry here. A lot was uncertain in my life then and as I re-read my postings I remember the helpeless and drowning feelings that consumed my every thought. And here I am, a year later, battling some of the same issues and faced with new ones as well.

To bring things up to speed, I ended up being very involved in the fitness studio and even taught a basic dance and GLEE class for several months. It was a blast and a time that I will never forget. I re-discovered my love for dance and fitness and learned that I could be a successful teacher as well as student. A couple months into teaching, I interviewed for and landed a job as an Academic Counselor for an online university. I have now been working for 5 months and I generally enjoy what I do. In addition, Trent was tipped off to a job posting for a fleet mechanic at the Town of Gilbert and he ended up landing the job through a phone interview, nonetheless! Both positions have been major blessings for us individually as well as for our family in general. For the first time in our 10 years together, Trent and I work on the same shift and in the same vicinity to one another. We are able to carpool to work and Mia goes to school in this area as well. When we get home at night, we cook dinner together, clean up together and get the kids ready for bed together. It's pretty awesome. We have time to talk about our days now.

We are still dealing with the financial "backlash" of me having been unemployed for 2 years and him for 6 plus 6 months of being severely underemployed. I am just looking forward now and trying not to get stuck in the woulda-shoulda-coulda game when thinking about the past. I plan on starting a Masters program soon and eventually things will balance back out again.

As I type, my lunch break is ending and I better get back. Hopefully I can use my lunch break to reconnect here and get back on track with writing as well. For now it feels good to be back.