Hold please

For a looooooooong 8 months it’s felt like my life was on hold! Wait to buy this, wait to plan that. Patience and I are not very good friends, never have been and never will be. But I’ve learned so much over the last 8 months. One minute I’m on a high driving to Laughlin and can’t wait to have some fun and the next minute I’m on the phone with a devastated husband telling me he just lost his job.
While him losing his job was the biggest relief off of both of our shoulders it also was a huge hit to us. Bittersweet.

What a whirlwind the last 8 months have been. Before Victor lost his job we would always complain about how everyone blames every little thing on the "economy". Boy were we hit hard by that same little word that we had rolled our eyes at before! Job interview after job interview he was too qualified for so most positions out there! Really?!? You mean to say that I don’t have a job at all yet I’m too qualified for this job? DUMB! No bigger positions were open for him. It was a really frustrating time for the both of us. Now, I’m not a man, but I can say from experience and advise from friends and family around us that men take losing their job in a much harder and different way than women. It was a very, very, VERY hard thing for me to deal with. It doesn’t just effect the person who loses their job, but it effect everything and everyone around them. It takes a toll on a man’s ego, it somehow makes them feel like they aren’t worthy of your love or much of anything. It’s sends them into a depression of sorts. It’s tuff on a marriage and on the child. Who knew that just because of losing a job so many things and people would be this effected? I sure didn’t and I had to learn the hard way.

The positive about the whole situation is the fact that you learn to try and live without that second income. You try and buckle down that belt and get rid of everything you don’t need. Everything you can live without. Which kind of in a crazy way made things easier and happier. Simplicity. It made us get out in the yard and work our butts off to pick weeds and trim our roses. It made that monthly gardener fee that we hated to pay, look more and more valuable! I have a new respect for people who have to garden yards like ours!
We cooked more at home, we played more at home. We read more, we spent more time with each other. There are so many positives about cutting back on so much! You really learn to value money even more then you thought you had before!

Another BIG positive for me was having Victor be able to stay at home with Alana most of the time. (Minus a few days a week he needed for job hunting). He is a great house wife!! He cooks and he cleans and does laundry…. And he LOVES the time to take Alana to the park and story time at the library. If nothing else, the last 8 months brought him closer to Alana then I would have thought possible!

I didn’t want to blog to much about the job lose because we were really trying to move forward in a positive direction into the future and not think about it! Months and months of no job offers and you get discouraged. I couldn’t help but keep a positive attitude and remind him and myself that God has something big planned for him and it would just be a matter of time and when it came it would be great!! We started to attend this church that we really loved a few months ago. We even started to go to the young couples Bible study they had. At the end of the first group we went to they asked if anyone had any prayer requests…. Of course I had to throw us in for prayers! Victor needed a job! About 2 weeks passed by and he finally gets a great opportunity at a retail store. Yes, you’re thinking, that could be a coincidence… sure it can. But prayer also works very well when done often! While in background check with this retail chain he gets ANOTHER job offer… really? All at once? Isn’t that just how it works? If he took the retail store, he would have just been settling for it because it’s a job, and well… he didn’t have one so we were grateful for it! The second opportunity came at him in full force. Interview one day, 2nd interview and dinner the next and a job offer the next day! Let’s talk about a stressful few days!!

Today he started his new job at an awesome Hotel! If you know where we met, he’s back into that family of brands and couldn’t be in a better place!! He’s a great location right near our house and the company is if not the largest, the second largest hotel chain around! That means plenty of opportunities for growth!!! Not to mention his favorite part about the place is the fact that all the baseball teams stay there during baseball season when they come to play the Angels! Which, by the way, on his first day of work they invited him to the game tonight… not so shabby right? You couldn’t imagine how excited and happy he is to be back on his feet walking around a hotel all day! He’s a crazy hard worker and hates to be bored! He really did get the best job EVER and is sooo happy about it! I’m pretty sure I cried at least twice today on the way into work because I was so happy and relieved and happy and relieved!!

I feel like I just won an Oscar and need to thank so many people! Everyone helped in any way they could or knew how in some way or another! Emailing jobs, asking people, listening to me bitch… so many people to thank. So thank you.

We have a BIG long list of things that we need for the house, for our life and for our sanity! I’ll be posting about them as I cross them off our list!!!!

Turning off the hold music.