Onward and upward

It's college basketball season, my favorite time of the year! Oh, and it's the holidays, too. But I really love BB season...games on almost every night...it's still many months til the Final Four, and anything can happen. It makes me happy on cold winter nights.

Speaking of cold winter nights, my husband started a new job in a city 200 miles away last week. Which means that he spends 4 nights a week there, and 3 nights a week here. I really can't fuss, though - this job is a significant move up for him in terms of compensation, responsibility...everything. We hope it will position him for executive level positions when he decides that this job is not where he wants to be anymore. So, it provides the opportunity for him to move up - significantly.

Of course, the potential drawback is that this is a new company. And new companies fail ALL the time. That was actually the thing that made me most nervous about him accepting this position. What if? [I'm great at the what-ifs...] So we have decided that since he is making more money, and we were squeaking by just fine before, that we would save a LOT more money just in case. It's also a bit easier because my earning potential should increase significantly in the late summer, when I take a faculty position.

His taking this position has generated some interesting responses from people we know here in town. At my place of work - where they are quite open about wanting me to stay as a faculty member - several people have expressed concern, and have asked whether I need to move to the city now that N is there most of the time. I guess because we have done the long-distance thing many times in many different iterations, I find this surprising. It's not like he's being deployed for 18 months. It's not like he's flying to India every week. He gets in his car and drives 3 or so hours, and then he stays at an apartment, works like a demon, and comes home to us on Thursday afternoons. Which, quite honestly? Gives me LOTS of time to get work done. And then we can enjoy each other's company Fridays through Sundays. I mean, don't get me wrong - it's an adjustment (particularly for someone who is not really fond of being alone in the house...thank goodness for the dog...) but it's not like our lives are falling apart.

And this has also opened up worlds of opportunity for me. Waaay back in 2008 (ha!) when we were figuring out where we wanted to move when I finished my degree, we chose this area because we could both have long-term jobs in a small town with good schools. Now that we have decided not to pursue IVF, well, to be honest? The good schools are more a painful reminder of what we *don't* have, rather than something we will need in the near future. N was fine staying in his job - dead ends and all - if it meant stability, relatively good income, and health insurance. But again - not having kids means that we don't really need to focus on those things. I mean, sure the health insurance is good, and it's nice to have a stable income. But he didn't need to tie himself here to get those things. He was able to move on and up and into a new job opportunity that provides him with a lot of opportunity for growth. I have also decided to open up my job search - so that I now have 5 potential universities instead of just the one where I am currently. Even nicer? Two of those other universities are interested in interviewing me. So we are both positioning ourselves to move onward and upward in our chosen fields - something that might not have been possible (at least to this degree) if we had chosen another path last spring, when we were told that our only option was IVF, and even that wasn't a certainty.

I don't mean that we aren't still mourning the fact that we will be a family of two...or that our lives will be very different from what we had planned two short years ago. But there are some positives in this. Maybe I'm trying to be Pollyanna - maybe it's the season for that - but I'm going to try to find the good in this situation. Otherwise the negatives weigh me down, and that gets exhausting after a while.

We're going to have a quiet Christmas at home. We're not even doing gifts for each other - he gave me a heart rate monitor, and I gave him a Bluetooth earpiece for his BB when we were at his parents' the other weekend. We have some gifts for the dog - and I have a card for him. But we're just going to hole up here, enjoy each other's company, and try not to do work for a day. That's going to be the hardest part. ;)