This has been a year of change.

Since I posted that brief and rather depressing entry in January, I've done a lot of soul searching and talking with Kirk and number crunching and more soul searching and agonizing and overthinking and decision making and more talking with Kirk and a little more soul searching, and in April I finally gave my notice at work.

We have a kid who faces big challenges, many of them different from those other kids his age face.  He needs me more.  Work needed someone more, too.  I couldn't be more of me in both places, so something had to give.  More and more, it was my sanity, and that was no good.  Work can replace someone.  My child can't.  So...I took a deep breath, wrote up my letter of resignation, and gave my notice with an end date two months out, allowing enough time to find and train my replacement.

About two weeks later, early in the morning of April 22, I had an accident on our trampoline that left my left leg/knee with a complete tear of the ACL and the MCL, damage to both the medial and lateral meniscus (menisci?), and fractures of the patellar pole and the tibial plateau.  I spent the next six weeks on the couch, getting up to pee and (eventually) go to physical therapy. 

Today, I am walking with a brace and preparing for ACL reconstruction surgery in October.  In the meantime, Will and I are hanging out for the summer while he gets to just be a kid, not get shuffled off to camps and programs he dreads so that I can go to work to earn enough money to pay for the camps and programs he dreads.

Given the accident, things have not gone quite the way I expected.  I never went back to work, save the one day I went in to clean out my desk and eat cake.  My project list, the one I made during all that soul searching and discussing with Kirk, has been pushed forward, given my limited mobility and summer sidekick.  It also grew, given the six weeks I had to watch HGTV and DIY until I wanted to knock down walls and create an open floorplan (not gonna happen in this house; hello, structural supports!).  But regardless of that, and of the fact that there is a gigantic learning curve involved in shifting to being home full-time after, well, truthfully, never doing it before.  I don't count when Will was a newborn and my life was dedicated to either feeding the baby or waiting to feed the baby 100% of the time, and then, once he was 12 weeks old, I went back to work for at least a few hours each week. 

I told Kirk I'd given myself a new job title:  I am our household's Domestic Engineer.  The pay isn't so great, but the benefits are out of this world.  I look forward to enjoying the fruits of my labor.  You know, once I can walk without feeling like Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein. "What hump?..."

Here's to living, not just existing!