Lazy Sunday

I am sitting outside right now, watching my husband play in the pool with the kids.

It stormed today and that messed with the rhythm of my day. I woke up with an upset stomach, something that used to happen more frequently. Now, it only strikes every once in a great while. It caught me a bit off guard.

Storms rolled in around 12:30, which dashed our plans to hang at a local splash pad with my mom's group. We ended up taking a detour to the library. Spent a little time there, then headed back home. By the time we left the library, I had the beginnings of a migraine. I have medication that I take for it, but it tends to knock me out for a couple of hours.

I was determined to hit my step count today. I've been on kind of a tear the past week and a half. Most of that is probably owing to participating in Wizards Unite, but all the same, it's become another part of my daily discipline. I went on a lengthy walk, came back and snacked on some saltines and 7UP. I'm hoping that my stomach will be back to normal by tomorrow.

In any case, I'm sitting outside. This is not normally where I choose to write, but I'm trying to harness the break in bad weather.

I'm enjoying watching my husband with our kids. We have been together for almost eighteen and a half years. We have been married for fourteen. We have four kids together. We have lived in the same house on a quiet street for eleven years.

He has been out of work for almost five months. He had previously been with the same company for almost twenty-one years. His work ethic is epic. He is dependable to the nth degree. I've discovered that it's easy to scare him. He has a lot of routines around the house. I tend to hide in our closet, with the light off, and wait for him to open the door. I know about how long it takes him to walk the perimeter downstairs. I know he has a set routine for how he places his things on the armoire.

He continues to work part-time at Walmart and has been on several promising interviews, though none has panned out to this point. It is tough to see him struggle to find work. He has taken to making self-deprecating comments and though I know they're not true, it's hard to hear him make them.

We have been staggering under the embarrassment of blessings that has come our way. It's gone a lot more smoothly over the past five months than we could have ever imagined.

That's not to say it hasn't required a lot of spiritual and emotional fortitude. The kids, especially Bekah, are old enough to want things and to ask about why we don't have things. Last night, for example, we went to Three Oaks. She really wanted to visit a pool. We had received some money from my dad after the movie on Friday night. I explained to her that we didn't have a lot of extra money, and that going to the pool could be expensive. I said she had a choice, either we go to Three Oaks, which is free, and get ice cream, or we go to a pool and get no ice cream.

She was nonplussed, but ultimately, she decided on the ice cream. (Actually, it's custard. And I'm gonna stop you right there, because you're going to say it's the same thing. It's really not. There is only one place for custard and it's Julie Ann's. There are many places in the region for custard, but Julie Ann's is the only one of consequence.)

There is a part of both Brian and I that wants to just be able to do things, without having to get out the adding machine and abacus and trying to see if it's feasible. We want to be able to say yes more. At the same time, we see how entitled our kids already act. We shake our heads about that and lament how much worse it would be if we actually were able to say yes more.

Ultimately, whatever job God decides to place Brian in, we are going to have to continue to be good stewards of those resources. It may make it easier to maneuver (we don't have credit cards, we only use cash), but ultimately we aren't going to be able to travel to Hawaii.

I am not sure where I'm going with this, except to say that I love my husband a lot, both because he's a great husband and a great father. The kids all love him tremendously and enjoy being with him. I am hopeful that this period of unemployment ends sooner rather than later. I am trying hard to keep the faith that God has a plan. I'm doing my best not to wrest the pen away from him while he's in the middle of writing it.