“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet, at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.”
Piglet is my spirit animal. I’m an excitement over breakfast girl any day. If you give me the choice between somewhere new and somewhere practical, I’ll choose new so often that you’d think I didn’t care about my food. Or my bed. Or my money.
The thing I’ve struggled with the most in having kids is the deafening dullness and the routine of it. People always need fed, people always need bedtimes, people always need diaper changes, and too much change wrecks their lives. And when I had a dog and two children, it got to the point where if I walked the dog at a different time in the morning, it would wreck her life, and if I took a different walking route the babies would cry, because it would be too long, or they wouldn’t be able to see ‘that one tree where the lizards are, Mom’.
Getting to the point where you can’t even walk the dog a different way was a soul crushing place for me to be, and so I’ve actively fought against that place my whole four years as a parent. It’s why I go on vacations even when it’s the hardest thing in the world, and it’s why we try to get out of the house every day. It’s partially for the boys, to see the world and to keep learning, and also it’s for me. So I don’t go crazy and end up as one of those moms on news TV with the haunted evil eyes.
Joe is the breakfast over excitement sort, and that’s been cemented these past few months when we made the decision that he would get the next job instead of me. (It might have been me, but I probably would have settled for a volunteer English teaching job in Africa and forgotten that we needed to eat. And retire. And invest. And other things I don’t generally care about.) So putting Joe in the looking-for-a-job spot seemed the best move to make. He inclines that way naturally, but as these months of looking went on, he had to become more and more that way as time went on.
When it’s your job to find the job, to find where the next house and the next car and the next year of meals comes from, you forget about excitement. Practicality is what matters. It matters a bit more when you’ve been one month without a job, and a great deal more when you’ve been five months without a job.
But we still had ideas of where and what we wanted to do. We wanted to focus in Chicago, and 95% of the jobs he applied for were there. It seemed likely we would end up here, and that was both gratifying, because I do love Chicago with all my heart, and just a tiny, itsy bitsy bit disappointing. (For pretty much just me, at least.) I mean, it was KNOWN. It was the PLAN. We would have cool, orange autumns again, and dark blue lake shores. We would have public transportation and an old Chicago brick bungalow. (I had even picked out the neighborhood.)
But sometimes, just every once in a while, something happens that we do not expect.
Sometimes, as Pooh said, excitement and breakfast can be “the same thing.” And this time, it worked out that way for us too. So for us, in less than a month, we’ll pass the signs that say, ‘Welcome to Florida.’
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