Wednesday, August 26, 2009

A New Paradigm For The Fox Family - And A Facebook Faux Pas

DISCLAIMER - Anyone who is only interested in my running can stop reading now :-)

Life in the Fox Family has been shaken up a bit over the past few days.

My wife Sherry is a teacher by trade. Since the time our first child was born, she has been a Stay-At-Home-Mom - with a private tutoring business on the side. This has been great when the kids were really young - it gave her flexibility to be with the kids during the day, and then I would watch them after work in the early evening while she tutored.

Now that my older son is going into 2nd grade, and my younger son will be going to Nursery School 5 days a week until 2pm, Sherry was going to try and change the business model of her tutoring business. Many private schools in the area allow tutors to come in during school hours to work with their students, and my wife was hoping to line up her sessions while the kids were in school. She had done this with one of her students last year and it worked out great.

That was the plan...until Thursday morning.

We logged into our email at the hotel on our way back from Florida on Thursday morning and found that the private school where Sherry tutored last year had a teaching position open. They were trying to contact her to see if she was interested in the position.

She spent many hours on the phone (luckily I was doing most of the driving) getting more information on the position and trying to come to a favorable agreement for her and the school. Long story short - she started today!

Her employment does change a lot of things for us. First of all, I will need to drive my younger son to school each day (Sherry will drive carpool in the morning for our older son on the way to her school). Also, we need to work out coverage for the kids this week (while she is at the school planning and preparing) and for my younger son next week (his school starts a week after everyone else does). Coverage for the kids was rarely an issue in the SAHM days.

It also means that things are just less flexible around here. If I want to run in the morning, I need to ensure I'm up and out the door by a specific time to be back before Sherry leaves for work/carpool. Looking ahead, I have some 8 mile weekday runs on the schedule coming up...I'll likely need to get out the door in the 5:30am timeframe for those. Ouch!

On the flip side, it should ease things up for us financially. We should be able to chip away at some debt (Home Equity lines of credit always seem like a good idea when you first use them...) and even start to save more (maybe for another Disney vacation???)
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We had a Facebook Faux Pas last night.

My wife went to change her status to "I'm starting a NEW JOB tomorrow!". However, our shared computer in the kitchen popped my email address in the user login window instead of hers and she ended up changing my status to this.

An hour later I open my email to see about 20 comments about my Facebook status. When I started to read these comments I immediately knew what had happened. Sherry updated the wrong account's status!

I wrote a comment explaining that it was Sherry starting the new job, not me...that the computer signed in with the wrong account.

Luckily, I have not "friended" any of the colleagues in my group at work nor any of my customers (some of my work friends that I worked with before are FB friends, but no one in my current group). That would have been really embarrasing!!!

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