Here I am

[TheWife]

Well, we've been going through a lot of stuff, and I had to just take a breather for a month or so until I felt like myself again. I'm still not quite there, but doing better. Bryton is sleeping 8-10 hours now, I think until we get to that point, it just really makes me crazy to get up in the middle of the night with him, so I'm glad we're past that now.

So let's see-Bryton's arm, if you remember, looked bruised and swollen when he was born. It never went away so we had to go to Primary Children's to check it out. They did a biospy on him at one month old, it was so sad. He has a "tufted angioma". It's basically discolored skin, from his shoulder to his elbow, it looks bruised. And it has these lumps in it (that's where it gets the word tufted). If it grows they will treat it w/ steriods, but so far it's staying about the same. They said it may be tender to him but shouldn't cause a lot of pain. The only scary part is that there is a syndrome that can develop with it at anytime that can cause problems with blood clotting which could end up being fatal. But that is extremely rare and we aren't really going to stress about it because perfectly healthy babies end up with fatal things too so it's not worth thinking about IMO.

Kyla was making me crazy for a little while with her "mothering" Bryton, but I think the novelty of him has worn off now lol. For the first month or so she would not stop touching him and constantly wanted to change his diaper, feed him, or shove a binky in his mouth.

Caleb is down to 6 weeks of Kindergarten left and I can't wait for it to be over. I didn't realize having kids in school was going to be so hard! He thinks he is a Jedi Knight, and he has also started writing books by stapling a bunch of papers together and then writing stories on them and drawing pictures. It's pretty funny, I'll have to post some pictures of them later.

I go in for Breast Reduction surgery tomorrow. I'm pretty excited about it. I've cursed my large breasts for years and I'm glad to be rid of them! Because of the pregnancy, I've met my out of pocket max for the year so it's not going to cost us anything!

Now for the aviation part...(sorry this is getting long already and about to get longer). After a year of dh instructing, he's made a whopping $8000 for the whole year, and only has gotten about 400 flight hours, and still doesn't have the MEI and has 29 ME hours. So now we are in massive amounts of debt, but luckily have an equal amount of equity in our home.

He has been offered a job at Scenic Airlines in Boulder City/Grand Canyon. It doesn't pay well at all, but they guarantee 140 hours a month and they'll pay a $4 per hour bonus in November to anyone that stays there. The hours are good, it's ME turbine time, and he supposedly can upgrade to CA pretty soon which would give him PIC turbine time. If it all works out, he could be there for about 2-3 years and be eligible for a major, or for some other corporate job or Net Jets or something, from what I understand. So he'd basically be skipping the regionals. So it SOUNDS good, but geez, how many times have we been through trying something and years later it ends not being what it was supposed to be, or not working out somehow. So I'm super stressed about it.

The really bad part about it though is that we will have to move which I swore I'd never do. Because it's not a traditional airline, he can't really commute to get to it, and his overnight expenses won't be paid for. Because of the amount of debt we are in from his lack of income, we can't afford our house, and to pay for him to live there, and the gas to come home and visit. So we pretty much have to move, which is scary given the lack of stability in this industry. But we seem to be running out of other options. We need to get our debt paid off and reduce our expenses.

His only other real options would be to apply to American Eagle which we haven't heard great things about, and sounds like he'd be sitting mostly in reserve, so again he'd have living expenses away from home. The other option would be to keep instructing at UVSC, get his MEI and instruct ME until he gets to 100, but at the pace he's been going, that could be 4-6 months or more, and then we'd be in more debt, and he'd just end up in a large pool of other waiting hopefuls for Skywest.

So any thoughts would be appreciated. It sounds like this is what we have to do and I'm getting the house ready to put up for sale. Hopefully the crappy market won't make it too hard. I've never lived away from family before, we see our family 3-4 times a week, in addition to constantly spending weekends together at the family cabin. It would be hard enough to be away from them with a decent income, so we could have some fun as a family and have money for a babysitter when we need one, and gas money to come home for visits. But since the pay isn't very good, we'll be away from family and have NO extra income at all. So I'm getting pretty tired of this industry and every thing that comes with it but I'm trying to stay strong and be supportive.

Sorry I've missed what is going on for everyone else. I can't even try to catch up on all the old posts but I hope every one is doing well!