A Season of Change

Resolutions.  A fresh start.  A new leaf.  As the calendar page flips from one year to the next, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of doing something different.  Something better.  Something NEW.  But guess what?  You don’t need to wait until January 1 to embrace a change!

Growing up, I loved switching things up a bit every now and then.  If I couldn’t sleep, I’d rearrange the furniture in my room (come on, I know I’m not the only one.)  In the 10 years after I turned 15, I colored my hair at least as any times:

Before I took up digital scrapbooking, my husband was fond of saying my hobby was collecting hobbies, because I could never stick with one thing for very long.  While I’ve never really thought about it this way before, as I look back over my life, I guess it is a bit of a recurring theme.  In this area, I am the yin to my husband’s nice-and-comfy-always-knows-what-to-expect yang.  Which is good, because right now, we’re getting all kinds of intimate with that big fat CH word.

Just over two years ago, we returned to our alma mater to work for the same department we had worked for before heading to grad school three years earlier.  While things were quite a bit different upon our return, you could effectively say we’ve been working with the same people, doing essentially the same jobs for the last 7 years.  We love the town, the people, and the cute little starter home we purchased last year.  I was really enjoying flexing my mind a bit working outside the home after being a SAHM for three years, and while it wasn’t always peaches and cream, we definitely considered ourselves quite happy and contented most of the time.

It was in this state of pre-holiday bliss that our lives shifted just a bit.. It was just before Thanksgiving, and we were looking forward to a wonderful holiday season full of family and friends, easy-going and stress-free, when the message came in (don’t worry, it’s not as awful as it sounds.)  A friend of ours from undergrad had a great job opportunity that was a perfect fit for my husband, and were we interested?  Like I said before, we were perfectly happy where we were, but this was too good to turn down.  Flash forward a week or so, and it’s Thanksgiving weekend, we’re going in for a pre-interview with a “real” interview scheduled for Monday, and by the Thursday after turkey day DH is officially offered the job and starts the week before Christmas.

I’m sure you can imagine what our holiday season turned into now that we needed to sell our house, buy a new one, quit both our jobs – me going back to the world of SAHMs and him diving right into the new one, and move 100 miles away, all by the new year.  No, it’s not gone exactly according to plan – we’re currently living with my parents to avoid the financial burden of two mortgages while we wait for our cute little starter home to sell (anyone in the market?) – and we’re re-evaluating on an almost-daily basis, but we’re making it work.  We look on the bright side – our kids aren’t in school yet, so they haven’t had to deal with that stress (although we really miss our day care friends), we’re able to spend some quality time with grandma and grandpa (although if things were a bit more child-proofed, it might be a bit more quality), and we just take it one step at a time.  Which is really the best piece of advice I could give someone heading into any kind of change – large or small.

New diet?  New job?  Heck – new recipe for dinner tonight?  Don’t sweat the small stuff, bite things off in manageable pieces, and know that somewhere down the line, you’ll look back at today and realize what a blessing it was – even if right now you’re questioning it – and that all those painful moments of discomfort at stepping away from something known and into the unknown have made you a better and a stronger person.  Rejoice in the change.  Embrace the change.  And when I’m cursing myself after being spit up on for the eleventy-millionth time and am craving an adult conversation, go ahead and link me back up to this post – I’m sure I’ll need it..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 at 5:00 am and is filed under ScrapMatters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.