Where’d we go?

It has been awhile since we have posted and there have been some posts floating around in my head half written, but there have been some actual big things going on in our lives that I’ve been struggling over whether or how to post about, and somehow it didn’t seem right to put up random notes on infant bathers and ignore the big issues. (That, and we have been BUSY.) But it is just so much easier to write about the trivial things. And do significant but technically non-Peanut related things in our lives really belong here? I just don’t know. But here it is, 4:30am and I’m awake and without real work that seems urgent (how I generally kill the wee hours if I can’t sleep), so here it goes.

The biggest of the big things, and one that came at us from left field, was the death of one of my cousins in an accident last week, at the age of 25. I was frustrated not to be able to go to the funeral, but the doctor left no wiggle room when we asked permission, and so we sat at home while my parents drove up. I really wanted to be there for his parents and sister, not that I could really do anything, but just to be there, you know. But, at the same time, not going has made this whole thing much easier. Too easy, really, because basically it doesn’t seem real at all. I had been really looking forward to this Christmas in Louisville and trying to get a lot of the family together, as we do every 10 years when my grandparents hit another milestone anniversary, but suddenly I am starting to dread it. In the past year there have been too many holes in the family. This thought, and a whole host of others—some linked to myself and my siblings, others tied to wishing there was a protective bubble to put around Peanut—occasionally swirl through my head, but without being forced to confront them, I push them back down and go back to work, as healthy as that usually is.

It seems completely absurd to transition from something so real and actually important to the things that seemed so big and important before we got the news about Collin, as though they are even in the same universe, but transition I will because otherwise this post can’t exist. Mid April is when each year we basically find out what the following academic year is going to look like. Not in terms of classes, but things like where we will be living and how much money we’ll make. You know, nothing important, particularly with a baby coming in a month. Joe won a very prestigious fellowship, but they are short on funds and so it was a toned-down version and so would have required us to move to Philadelphia for 4 months for no more money than he would get if we stayed here. It was hard for him to turn it down, but the logistics of making that work just seemed to require too much sacrifice for the pay off. And me? Well, I basically struck out. And so as of now I have no source of income after mid January. And as the kicker, if I don’t defend by February we also have to pay spring tuition for me, so guess who suddenly is planning to defend her dissertation in early February? Because there isn’t enough going on in the next nine months, right? Basically, next year is going to be messier than we had hoped, but we’ll be fine. What we really need now is the economy to pick up so that there are actually jobs to apply for with these degrees we will be frantically completing.

So, those are the big things going on in our world. In addition, I just turned in another chapter and Joe is working to finish one in the next couple weeks. Stacy is now here visiting and I had hoped for a few days of escape, but so far haven’t been able to get my brain to let me unwind.

Now, on to the superficial posts.