Happy New Year! (and the same old same old)

You have jury duty! That’s right. The first Monday of the new year and I’m summoned for jury duty. I ended up getting excused because of a business trip I have to take next week, but I’ll be called back again in a month. I admit this doesn’t make me very happy. I’m all for doing my civil duty and think being part of the legal process would be very interesting…but I find it impossible to clear my schedule for a week or two (or longer) at a time. Who really can do that? I tend to have so much going on at work and at home, that I can’t see being available to sit in a trial for even as long as a week without something else in my life suffering for it. I guess I just need more prep time. I find going on vacations difficult enough….I can’t give up that kind of time to be a juror.


Anyway, so far the new year has just been ok. Not that it’s been bad, but it hasn’t started with the same bang of excitement as in previous years. Last year, I was starting the new year with a new job offer and a new baby, the year before with a new husband, and years before that with excitement of starting something fresh, leaving problems of years past in the past. This year, nothing is changing. And maybe that’s how it should be. I’ve reached the point in my life where things are ok and having the “routine” of last year carry forth into this year is actually pretty great.

I’m not huge on New Year resolutions. I used to make them as a teenager at my mother’s insistence (she’s huge on all things traditional and superstitious). And being the overachiever that I am, I always tried to follow through with them. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that resolutions are kind of ridiculous. After all, I should always be living the way that makes me happy, even if that means working on things and doing things that don’t necessarily make me happy the moment I’m doing them. And who wants to start off a new year with pressure to change? If I want to lose weight (which I do), then I try to eat right and exercise all the time…giving myself leeway for holidays and vacations. I don’t see the point in waiting until January 1 to start a diet and then going in full force.

But, liking resolutions or not, Roger and I did make one this year. We have a solid marriage and great relationship, but we have gotten wrapped up in “life”…making our family and our household work. I started to feel like we lost the couple that we have been all these years before Kaelyn arrived. We used to try to have a regular date night and as great as those are, they are impractical for us. Our work schedules are long, we both want to spend time with Kaelyn before she goes to bed, and we are pretty tired ourselves by the time we wind down. Still, I miss the fun we had…we still have a lot of fun, it’s just that now we have to plan for it and that sucks.

So, Roger suggested that we pick one hour every night for just us. The hour directly after Kaelyn goes to bed. No tv, no work, no cleaning. If we choose to play a game, or share a glass of wine together, and talk, tell jokes, whatever. It’s our time…and I love this idea! We don’t have to plan dates, eat out, pick movies to watch. We don’t have to arrange for a baby sitter, we can just be. It makes being us a lot easier and much less work. Of course, last night, the first night that we were going to implement this, we ended up spending an hour on hold and then talking to an on-call nurse because Kae was running a fever. She was acting like she felt fine, but she was just so hot. The fever broke sometime during the night (thank goodness she slept through the night!), but it was impossible to concentrate on anything but that. By the time we were off the phone armed with information and instructions for how to treat her, it was around 10:30. Roger and I were both feeling pretty tired. We went to bed, but I stayed up most of the night checking on her. At midnight, she was still running a high fever…though below 103 (105 is when they wanted the emergency room visit). By 3 am, her temp was back down to normal (without the aid of a fever reducer). She’s better now, has her 15 month check up tomorrow, so I’ll talk to her doctor about it more then, which leaves us tonight (hopefully) to try out our hour of “us” time. Yeah 