How does one become...

...a housewifehusband you might ask?  Well, it generally happens when and educated and successful husband wife finishes school and goes on to the real world, big time jobs, salary rather than hourly pay, and possibly even benefits.  Well being the 25 year old college student that I am, and Joni being the 22 year old college graduate that she is, we threw the worldly norms aside, she became a sugar momma, and I became a house husband.  Embarrassing fact, I just mentioned my age.  Yes, I will turn 26 in less than two months, no I will not have a degree by then (but I will have one a few short months later) so if you're doing the math, I will graduate college in 2013, and I graduated high school in 2005.  It doesn't take a math major to realize that I took about the slowest track possible to get things finished.  But alas, we are banking on the fact that my buoyant personality with shine forth during the job interview process and I will have a future employer smitten with my eloquence and grace who will be willing to look past the fact that I will omit my college GPA from my resume and make myself look like some sort of genius with years of experience, which let's face it, will be true!  Well that was a tangent if I've ever written one.  If I keep control of this blog for a while you will learn to buckle up when you start reading because it might be a wild ride!  Anyway, where was I going with that?

Now I think I remember what was happening in June, Joni was stressing about trying to find a teaching job.  Cache Valley tends to be very competitive for teachers from what I understand.  Beautiful overachieving women tend to get teaching degrees while they wait for their lethargic, neanderthal husbands to just grab any degree for the sake of finishing school (hence the house husbands) and they all look for jobs.  With only two school districts and some dinosaurs who never want to retire, there are obviously limited positions to be filled by a surplus of applicants.  Well unfortunately, Joni was a member of that vast surplus and though she worked her little fingers to the bone building a resume, passing it around far and wide, networking like crazy, and ultimately breaking down and crying to her dashingly handsome and surprisingly sophisticated husband who assured her things would work out...things didn't seem to work out.  Even when it seemed like every other first year teacher was finding a job somewhere, it wasn't working out!

As we got toward the middle of August we were dreading the reality that maybe it just wasn't going to happen this year.  We were starting to look into what it would be like for her to sub for a year and just get some more experience, and possibly pick up a part time job doing something she would enjoy to numb the sting of not being a teacher.  But then, one last time she looked on the county job listings and less than two weeks before school started, there were still a few interviews open.  To our amazement Joni was invited to all the interviews, for a few part time and a few full time positions.  One of the full time positions was actually two part time jobs morphed into one.  This listing was the second interview she got.  When she got home she felt pretty good about it but was prepping for the next interview for a part time computer teacher.  But before she had to leave for that interview she got a call.  I tried not to stare at her while she was on the phone and tried my best to eavesdrop with hopeful anticipation.  She hung up the phone and was offered a full time job as the ESL (English as a Second Language) job at two schools!  We were elated and our many hours of prayer, talking out different possible worse-case scenarios, tears, and hollow, but positive assurance were all worth it!  Just like that we received a great blessing and Mrs. McDonald was finally official!!

Now I wish I could say that this plaque signified the end of a journey.  It didn't.  Joni is a planner, she likes to be 5 steps ahead of the game.  She is a decorator, she couldn't live with herself if something she felt represented her (our apartment, her classroom(s)) was bland or boring.  Now being hired less than two weeks before the start of school is a great blessing, but for a woman who likes to have all her ducks in a line before they even leave the pond (does that analogy make sense?  It's late) this was terrible, it would have been terrible if it was one classroom, but because it was essentially two part-time jobs, she had TWO classrooms to decorate which upgraded to catastrophe from terrible to unimaginably horrendous.  By some tender mercy, she was able to turn two empty classrooms, into little jungle villages by the first day of school!

I think she had a hashtag like #ThisTimeImTheTeacher ... what a cutie

Pretty solid effort given the time constraints.  The decorations have only grown from there...

And so you can see how a regular dead beat college student becomes a house husband!