Getting Back Into the Groove

Having two weeks off of school was both fun and difficult. I am so addicted to studying that when I don't have any to do I tend to go a little crazy. However, it provided me the time to be able to finish a few gifts that I've been crocheting because one of my friends is having a baby, and the other is getting married soon. On top of that I've decided that I need to start an Etsy shop so that I can make a little bit of money while pursuing one of my favorite hobbies. Now I'm just finishing up the first week back in school and I'm wondering where in the world my last two weeks went.

I've started Educational Psychology, and so far the work is fun, though time consuming. The fact that it is more enjoyable means that I'm not procrastinating so much on it and I'm having more time for my son, husband, and housework. I'm actually able to start analyzing why it is that I can never keep the house clean (namely a one year old boy with the cleaning skills of a pig and more toys than any three children should have), and formulate ideas for how to make it easier to keep clean once I get it to that point. So far I've just started boxing up toys that aren't played with very often and I'll start rotating toys until I see him starting to out grow some of them.

Nap time has been my favorite time today. Three hours twice a day that I can sit and enjoy the quiet while studying or doing housework. I have tomorrow off work as well so I decided today will be trying to catch up on dishes so I can make more crock pot oatmeal for my son and for my cousin who is living with us while he goes to college around the corner from us. Tomorrow will be a laundry marathon during my breaks from homework, while tonight is homework as breaks from cleaning (its amazing how much homework you can get done in only an hour when you are actually sitting at a table to force focus). I will admit that now and then I can tell that someone is not sleeping, I'll either hear his glow worm start singing or I will hear his quiet howling that he loves so much to do and is SOOO cute.

On the crafting/Etsy front, I'm not even focusing on it all that much until after Thanksgiving because I have a lot on my plate already, and I don't want to over extend myself because I know that I will burn out too quickly if I do. I'm trying to find at least five things that I make to take good quality photos of before I open up my shop because I don't want to be the person that looks incredibly limited. So far I think I have four things as soon as I finish a stuffed animal for my already over-blessed son. I really wish I could put more time and effort into this endeavor because it is finally hitting my family that my husband working at Kmart with me is NOT going to make the bills all get paid every month. We make about $100-$200 less than we need just to meet all of our bills each month, and there's very little that we can shuffle around to make things work better. I'm sure that somehow it will work out, but at this point I have no idea how unless my Etsy shop takes off like a hornet.

My hour break is about to end, so I have to get back to doing dishes. I hope you all have a great day.

Life Can be Really Hard

Sometimes it almost seems like no matter what you do you can't seem to keep ahead of what life throws at you. For me it seems much like that right now. Thursday my husband lost his job, I'm working too many hours to be able to keep up in school gracefully. I'm pulling all-nighters two or more times a week, just to keep ahead of my homework. There are only three, perhaps soon to be two, workers in the restaurant at work, so juggling schedules is becoming harder and harder, I seem to be the one assigned all the slack.

Then yesterday, our next door neighbor's house burned down. I want to do everything I can to help them, which seems to be highly limited because of the fact that I'm never home. I'm doing everything I can to use my connections to get them help, but that all takes time, which I don't have much of.

I know I should be praising the fact that I still have my house and all of my things, especially in light of what just happened to them. But all I can see is that I can't help them because I don't have the time to put into it. Besides all that, the stress of not being able to keep up in school has been maintaining a really painful stress headache for the last five days.

Right now I'm just looking for new ways of handling stress and being able to help my neighbors out. Any advice that anyone has is something that I am paying much attention to because it may help me in the long run even if I can't use that information right this instant. This is just a tough season for many people, and my thoughts and prayers go out to anyone in the same situation as these I have mentioned.

The Problem With Being Me...

One thing that I have learned over the last 8 years is that I give too much to everything and everyone around me. I tend to give 110% to everything I do, which sometimes makes me seem incredibly bi-polar. One day I can totally love what I'm doing, then the next completely hate it because its taken/taking too much out of me. There are so many examples of this in my life...

The biggest example is that I love working, to the point of often being considered a workaholic. I think the main thing is that I like manual labor, the punishment and pain it takes to keep up with the men that do the same work. The part that makes me hate work is that I'm always driven to be the best at everything that I do, and I'm not that great at very much. The biggest perk of working for me is that I love saving money, saving to build an emergency fund, saving for the next big purchase I have planned, just saving to be saving, and having a job makes that possible.

Currently I like to say that I hate my job, and I just want to find one that's better. The reality is that I just don't like cooking or otherwise working with food. I love being called over to the register lanes or being asked to help with stocking or straightening, and I especially love helping bring the carts back in. I love the people that I work with, and that's mainly what keeps me there. I would say that I was made for retail, but I don't like the confinement of such a job either. It works for a means to an end, but not as a permanent solution.

I also love school, and I love to hate it. I love it as long as I'm getting straight A's, but as soon as I start slipping a little and I get less than an A on a project or other assignment, I can't help myself, I naturally start hating school and everything that it stands for. I also hate it because all of my friends from my first year of University are either in a career in their field or they are in grad school. You would think that if there is so much that I hate about school, I might just give up, but I can't. I love learning so much that I can't help myself, and I want what I know to actually count for something and help me do better for my family. I also want everyone to understand mathematics, especially now that I'm trying to become a teacher.

Another thing that I love is my family. I love the hard work and dedication that it takes to be a mother and a wife. I love my husband and my son. The funny thing is that I very much dislike the work associated. I wouldn't consider it quite to the point of hatred, but I really don't like the idea of doing housework. Maybe its because it seems that I'm always in a losing battle because I can't keep even one room of the house clean, maybe its because it feels like I'm the only one that actually cares to try to keep the house clean.

The last thing that I'm going to mention that I hate is probably something I share with at least 90% of the entire world over 24. I hate getting older. I mean, legitimately, infuriating, encompassing hatred. There is so much that I want to do before I'm too old to do it, but there's just not time or money for such endeavors. I hate that I forget how old I am, or more that I'm not the age that I think I am and feel like I am. I swear, other than still carrying a few too many pounds since my son was born, I still feel like I'm 18. I still want to do the same things that I did then. I had two full time jobs and still managed to find the time to ride my bike and my horse all the time. I can't even find the time to get my bike out of the shed to ride two doors down to see my horse now, and I don't understand why.

I think that the main thing that makes me who I am, especially in relation to the things I just mentioned, is that I have a major lazy streak. I like things that come easy. I like hard work that pays well, I like school when I can understand and keep up with minimal effort, I like spending time with my family without having to work to keep the house clean, and I like feeling and looking young and fit while sitting on the couch eating all day long. I have to constantly remind myself that not only did I marry a good cook, but as I get older my metabolism, brain, and body just can't keep up with the abuse that I put it through when I was younger. I need to get the right amount of sleep, exercise more, eat right, drink enough water, and study hard. The rest comes naturally. I will probably always love to hate what I do for work, when I'm a teacher I will probably love my students and teaching them what I know all the while hating the actual work of putting together my lesson plan.

The moral to all this: nothing comes on a silver platter. You have to do things that you don't like, even hate, to get to enjoy the things that you love. Its probably the hatred that you have that makes you love the things that you do anyway. This is as much for me to remember as anyone else.

What Has Brought Me to Where I am Now...

I'm not sure where to start in telling you about behind the scenes of my life, so I'll start from the beginning of my journey to where I am now.

When I was a kid, I wanted to do everything. I remember times wanting to be a professional runner, pro biker, pro soccer player, rodeo star, cowgirl, electrician, mechanic, carpenter, crazy cat lady, animal rehab therapist, animal psychologist, woodsman, forest service worker, actress, librarian, magician, fire fighter, animal trainer, truck driver...the list probably goes on much longer, but you get the point. I pretty much went through a stage of wanting to be just about everything there is out there. When I was eight or nine my parents took me to a program at the library done by a veterinarian in our area, I decided that night that I wanted to be just like her, an all-animal veterinarian. I stuck with that like glue to paper well into my college years. Of course I dabbled in many of my other interests as time went on.

Most of my life I have helped my dad at his work whenever he needed it, he works as a carpenter/woodsman. In high school I trained my sister's dog, my horse, and many cats. After I had made up my mind that I wanted to be a veterinarian, I started collecting books, learning all I could, treating my animals and giving them the medical attention that was legal for me to give (essentially everything except rabies vaccinations). Some of my friends and relatives started having me treat their animals as well. My senior year of high school I even convinced a veterinarian 20 miles from home (the nearest one) to let me volunteer in his office so I could observe what a veterinarian really does. I loved it and  I knew that life as a veterinarian was exactly what I wanted.

 When I started college, I was getting such good grades in my calculus class (yes, I was taking calculus as a freshman, and getting 100%) that the professor asked me if I would tutor a couple students. I agreed, and completely loved watching them start to understand why the letters made sense with the numbers. To me it was all a game because I live, breathe, and sleep mathematics. Unfortunately I couldn't stay at that University because I lost my scholarship. I had been taking 18 credits per semester and only passed my Animal Behavior, Farm Management, Companion Animal Care, Introductory Composition, Basic Religion, and Volleyball classes over the entire year (I didn't pass Calculus due to an altercation with the professor followed by an argument on the phone with my mother about my boyfriend at the time). I had failed the most important classes (or gotten too low of a passing grade for them to account for anything), Intro Biology being one of them.

 The following summer I got a summer job as a "Youth Crew Leader" in hopes of being able to pay off my previous year of college. My crew and I edged sidewalks; painted signposts, fire hydrants, park benches, the housings for life preservers on piers; did repairs on a local school; picked cherries; and counted left-handed snails. That same summer I was also working as a kitchen cutlery sales representative and essentially sold knives door to door, I knew this was not the type of job I was looking for because I hated the cold calls and having to have my act together in front of complete strangers (I had a terrible poker face and was terrified of having people focused on me and what I'm doing).

After that summer I started school at the local community college where I fell into a job that I completely loved, and for a time it changed all my thoughts about back up careers. I worked for the chemistry teacher in the lab. I was always doing experiments, organizing, prepping for students to come in for their labs, taking care of chemicals, mixing chemicals to make the appropriate ones for the experiments that students were going to be doing. I decided chemistry would be my back up career because it was the only science that was nearly entirely based on mathematics. I worked that job until I graduated three years later.

The summer between my second and third years of community college, the professor I worked for got me a summer job with the forest service as a Wildlife Intern. I loved being outside all the time, the work sometimes seemed a little worthless, but I still enjoyed it. We were doing canopy cover surveys, habitat surveys, wildlife surveys, and mostly just learning how to navigate with a map that doesn't show all the roads that we drive on while still not becoming lost. I loved this job so much that I applied for the actual position receiving pay instead of compensation the next year, but due to diversity issues that office was having I was not hired because I was like 90% of the workers there. Sometimes it really doesn't pay to be a tall white woman.

During the last year I went to the community college, I didn't have enough work in the chemistry lab to fill in my hours, so I was shared with one of the mathematics professors to help with grading. I absolutely loved it. He had given me an answer key to all of the homework and tests that I was grading, but I'm not sure I ever really looked at them because I could do the work in my head faster than looking from the page to the screen and back. It was so much better than grading chemistry and geology exams as I had been doing for the chemistry professor. I decided that mathematics would be my back up career, if I couldn't be a veterinarian, I would be a Mathematician.

After graduating with my Associate's in Biological Science, and barely missing my goal of graduating with honors, I decided I would try another year at a university as a Pre-Vet. I tried a different university than I had gone to my first year in hopes that it was my advisor and my lack of knowledge of how to stand up for myself that had messed me up. I got through one year there, but discovered that I can't handle classes that require large amounts of memorization. I failed Anatomy and Physiology as well as Biochemistry that year. This made me take a step back. I no longer knew what I was doing with my life. I clearly wasn't cut out to be a veterinarian, I tried twice and couldn't do it.

So I decided that I would be a Veterinary Technician, and started looking for schools that I could attend fully online so I could be at home with my new husband instead of traversing the country from school to school getting the top notch education that I desired. I found one that only required me to have a job in a veterinary office in replacement of taking a lab class. So I started pounding pavement. I searched through all the veterinary offices within 50 miles of my house hoping that one of them would hire me. None of them would because I didn't have a bachelors degree in any biology related field.

I was totally crushed, I no longer knew anything about what I wanted to do with my life. I could be a mathematician, but during my previous year of school I was counseled by a Mathematics professor that I shouldn't because the only job I would be able to get would be teaching, which wasn't what I wanted. I ended up getting pregnant, which gave me a reason to take a year off of school, and I got a job at a retail store in their restaurant. That was nearly two years ago and I'm still working that job because my husband's job doesn't pay all of our bills. I'm still not sure I really know what I want to do with my life, not entirely sure I want to be a teacher, but what I do know is that I have an 18 month old that will need to go to school someday and I don't want to rely on the school system to give him all that he needs educationally. I want him to make something of himself and do what I never could, make a life for himself and his future family that doesn't involve working yourself into the ground just to stay less than half a step ahead of the bills.

Last winter I decided that I would look into getting into a fully online Elementary Education program, especially if there was an emphasis in Mathematics. I found this program at only one school, all the rest needed me to be on campus for one or more classes. So I enrolled and have now completed three classes (this school does one class at a time). I'm actually fulfilling my dream of getting honors as I have a GPA of 3.9 right now, I've also contacted my school's chapter of the National Honors Society to join (another dream of mine). I feel like I'm finally on my way to something good, though my husband no longer agrees with me that I should be in school. I'm not happy that I had to take out my first loan, and I have to pay for a few things that I'm just not finding the money for at this point, but I know that if this is where I'm supposed to be, the door will open. However, in my experience, it usually waits until the last second before you run headlong into it, or just after you've been pounding it with your head a few times.