De-constructive criticism

The worst possible criticism is incredibly personal, is poorly timed, and comes from the people you love the most.

It can be meant with the best of intentions, but even knowing that, it doesn't make the cut any less deep.

MWF seeking job

After ten years at home with my children, I'm ready to re-enter the workforce.

I started submitting my resume and applications several weeks ago, and so far, barely a bite. As a matter if fact, as far as I can tell, no one has even checked out my references or called any previous employers.

Despite having a friend who works for the county government and has some pull, I wasn't even able to get an interview for their open "coffee and copy bitch" position.

It's a frustrating place to be, a skilled person with plenty of references and not even able to get my foot into the door.

The most discouraging of all has been that I haven't been called back about a job answering phones at the nail salon... and I'm the only person who applied.

It feels like all of these years, I thought that I was choosing to be home with my children, but as it turns out, I didn't have a choice.

Home is where your... time goes?

Homeowners from everywhere understand that title. My advice to anyone looking to buy a home is this: buy the house that NEEDS the least amount of work.

As time goes by, we, as human beings, are always growing and changing, and so, it is an inevitable fact that your home will need to do the same. When we have children, we need more bedrooms, as our children grow older, we need more living space, as time goes on, homes need updating and maintenance in order to maintain their value, both to us as the residents, and to the home market. With these updating, adding, changing, and growing projects, adding in additional "it just needs" projects makes your house feel more like a nagging chore than a home, unless of course you are blessed enough to be one of the few who have unlimited funds for paying professionals to do this work for you, in which case, you likely cannot relate, and for this reason, you are envied by millions! 

I often find myself wishing that all new projects could just freeze in time until we've had time to finish the ones that are already in progress, but alas, this is not the case.

Six years (and several months) ago, my husband and I had finally, after four long years of struggling, gotten to a place financially where we were finally able to buy our first home. We looked at more than a dozen, we made pro/con lists, carefully considering space and conveniences, locations, neighborhoods, school districts, features, bedrooms, and prices. In the end, we bought our friend's house. We loved it, but time and children, changing jobs, pets, and life in general, have made it an ongoing, ever-growing list of more work and headache than we could ever have imagined, and this is a house without any problems, well, any real problems. 

We noticed quickly that we needed to remodel the kitchen, at least a little, and update the appliances. Then my husbands job changed and we needed a home office, which forced a remodel of a larger room in order for our daughters to share a bedroom, and a remodel of one of their old bedrooms into an office. Then a friend gave us a big, beautiful corner tub, which required demo and remodel of our bathroom. In the meantime, or deck was falling off of the back of our house, so we needed to replace it. Now, as our oldest daughter is now a teenager, we remodeled again to add a new bedroom to separate them, and as a by-product, built an additional room in order to separate our sons also.

Six years after moving into our home, we now have a slightly unfinished kitchen, an unfinished bedroom, an unfinished bathroom, an unfinished family room, an unfinished deck, and the wear on other parts of the house is getting out of hand.

Will we ever catch up? Will we ever dig out of this hole we've created? 

I love our home, but I'm beginning to look at it with a near-resentment.