After two months, John's finally out of training and is now actually DOING the job he was hired to do and working his official shift. I switched to a part time schedule at work to accommodate his new schedule and though our bank account isn't too happy with this change, I am ecstatic! Less hours at a job I hate and more hours at home sleeping and/or with my family.
It feels like we're finally getting a little stability in our lives, which we've been sorely missing the last year or so. Financially, we're still broken, we have a long way to go before we're out of the hole again, but emotionally, we're feeling positive and happy and feeling like we're finally settling in.
We've also recently learned how to work around our schedules to have some couple time together, something we haven't had much of at all in the 10 months we've both been working. Our schedule goes something like this: I get up at 3am, go to work by 4, leave around noon and meet the boys and John at his work's offsite parking lot at 12:15, drop John at his office, spend the day with the boys until 8:30 then fall into bed. I'm long asleep by the time John gets home at 11 or 12, and he's fast asleep by the time I wake up to do it all again at 3am. We rarely have days off together, the most we get is a morning together if I have the day off or an afternoon together if he has the day off and that time is spent, naturally, as family time with the boys, both of us exahusted by the time the boys go to bed. Sometimes we try to watch a movie together, but usually I pass out before the opening credits are done.
Working part time now, sometimes I'll get home off work at 10:30, sometimes I won't have to start work until 6, but either way, our time is still very limited.
A couple of weeks ago, I told John to wake me up when he got home. I didn't work the next day and I could stay up as long as I wanted. So I went to bed with the boys at 8:30, John came home at 11, woke me up, I drank some coffee and we spent the night together watching Dexter on DVD until 2am. Having had a nap, I was wide awake, and since I had the morning off John was able to sleep in the next morning (I slept in too, by my standards, being woken up by the boys at 6:30). It was FABULOUS! Time together! Just us! And we were both awake!
We've been doing this on the nights before my day off since then and it's changed everything. We've been feeling disconnected from each other, getting in stupid little fights all the time, frustrated that our marraige felt less like a marraige and more like a shared child custody arrangement. It's amazing what a little TLC will do for a neglected relationship! We haven't had so much as a disagreement since we started doing this. We don't need elaborate date nights or fancy meals we just need to be together. Tonight, for example, we had Iron Man 2 on BluRay and a bag of microwave popcorn and it felt downright luxurious to sit on my sofa with My Honey and watch a movie uninterrupted by kids fighting or my snoring.
I had felt so hopeless, how can I maintain a good marraige when I have no time with my husband? The answer? MAKE THE TIME.
