Busy making things happen

Life has been a little nutty around the Hutchins household lately. We’ve been caught up in a whirlwind of activity that has been pinned in a vice grip of stress with moments of pure elation scattered throughout.

To begin with, my new job has produced its first paycheck which catapulted me to cloud nine. For someone who has been out of work for two years and focused on school, the opportunity to punch in and out on a time clock feels like a special privilege.

As soon as my pay hit the bank account, I called my husband, Chris, to tell him the news that I was now officially contributing to our household income. He said, “That’s awesome, honey. I’m going to pay the mortgage.”

It was nice to see those funds in the account for the brief amount of time they were there.

The pressures associated with my job stem from the fact that I have only very recently taken the exam that will either grant or deny me a license to become a board-certified Registered Nurse. As I sit here typing, I do not have the official results so I’ll save any further elaboration on this topic for another day.

I will say that trying to study for this exam has been a steady drain on my mental health and well-being, as well as the contentment of my family. I mean, how could a person realistically study for something that could have anything included in it that you learned over the course of two years from the content of nine hefty text books? It is mind-numbing.

Next, we had a primary election.

I get excited about these things and I try to get the kids involved, but that is a challenge to say the least. I dragged them both down to the Masonic Lodge anyway and showed them the difference in the ballots. The lack of interest from my son was almost palpable.

Not letting those two dampen my spirits, I happily bubbled in my choices and fed my ballot to the machine. When the assistant asked if we wanted stickers, the children were suddenly interested again and we all left feeling like we did something important.

Chris and our son both had birthdays this week too. Chris is now 40 and our boy just turned 12 years old, his last year before he becomes an official teenager. Both of these milestones were obviously emotional, but for different reasons.

Finally, school begins next week and I was able to escort the children on tours of their new schools.

Middle school will be a change for my son because he gets to have several different teachers. I can only hope they are ready for him. Unfortunately, he can’t play basketball on the school’s team until next year. He’ll be over 6 foot tall by then. We need to get this kid on track to support us one day.

My daughter is out of kindergarten and on to elementary school. She is incredibly excited about the transition and wanted to hang out in her new classroom as long as I’d let her.

She walked over to the magnet tablet and spelled “mom” for me which melted my heart. This was so much better than her last adventure in spelling.  

That’s what a former coworker, Jim, would call the “scuttlebutt” of my life lately. Now that everyone’s caught up, I think I’ll try to catch up on some sleep.