She did it!!!

Can you believe it? Faith learned to ride her bike without training wheels in one day!! I'm shocked! Now Anthony really needs to learn, but he just doesn't like to ride his bike that much! Oh well.

End of Training Wheels!!

Faith asked us to take her training wheels off her bike today and wasted no time getting the hang of it!

Anthony promoted to Bear Cub!

Last night Anthony's Den of Wolf Cubs were promoted to Bear Cubs! He's been having some good fun in his first year of cub scouts this past year. I think his favorite things have been making his own Pinewood Derby car and racing it, and making dinner (grilled hot dogs, steamed broccoli on the grill, potato chips and drinks) mostly all by himself for the family last week! That was probably his toughest requirement to complete to be promoted.
Of course Faith enjoyed being included in all the fun last night too!

What keeps me up at night...

A few jobs ago, I worked with someone who liked to ask that question.  He wanted to know what kept his bosses/customers up at night because that would tell him what the highest priorities were for us to focus on.  I've thought about that question often and I thought I wasn't very committed to my work at times because almost nothing at work would keep me up at night (except for a few times when I had so much to do that the to do list I kept in my brain would go into overdrive until I would get up and write it down so I could stop thinking about it!).  Really the early challenges with Faith and her surgeries over the years have been more than enough for me to have to think about at night, I don't need to be worrying about work; especially considering I work in the cable television industry - getting better TV to the masses just isn't something to lose a lot of sleep over!!!

But tonight I am wide-awake.  Can't sleep even after going to bed a couple hours ago.  My latest job ends tomorrow.  In the past 11 years I have had 6 different jobs and I have been laid off three times due to companies scaling back on projects I worked on, or basically going under (the case of my current layoff) one job change in all of those was truly my own choice where I left for a better job that was also closer to home; another due to a contract being completed and another due to not being paid regularly (and I was the lucky one for leaving when I did, the others who stayed lost 3 months of pay at the end of last year).  I am tired of having to find a new job so often.  It takes time and it's depressing when you think you have a bunch of opportunities and then they evaporate right in front of you.

At the moment, I have almost all my hopes on one possibility, I have been through 3 interviews phases and I know it's between me and some other guy.  They interviewed 8 or more people for the position, so it's nice that I've made it to the final two, but, unless I get the offer, it really doesn't matter that I made it to the final 2!

I have a few other leads right now, but they are far from solid possibilities.  So, after tomorrow I am down to 6 weeks of severance and after seeing the last 60 days (since we were notified of the company shutting down) fly by, I'm feeling much more stressed that 6 weeks will fly by in another heartbeat. 

And of course on top of trying to find a new job, we are also trying to plan Faith's next jaw surgery.  I haven't written about it lately because, in all honesty, ever since Dr. Gordon told us he thought we should do the scapula graft surgery instead of a jaw distraction, I've been having a hard time accepting it.  Right now it is scheduled to happen on June 7th and she would be in the hospital for about a week afterwards, but I'll be honest, I could see us canceling it and deciding not to do anything this summer.  Especially if I don't have a new job yet.  I just don't think we can afford the trip without having a new source of income by then.

Sorry for my long rant, just needed to get all this stress out of my head tonight and thought it would be good to write about it.  Hopefully I will have some good news to report by the end of the week.  And then I will write some more about the scapula graft surgery.

Thanks for listening,
Robin