Has anyone seen this man?

So Rob is in the midst of a string of night shifts right now at the hospital. It is-- how do you say? ah, yes-- very sucky. When Rob works night shifts, he is gone from the house about 14 hours, returns in the morning for about an hour of vegetating with ye olde Internet, then sleeps until dinnertime. He really just gets up to eat dinner with us and then heads out the door. Grace and I are with him for less than 2 hours, I think, in any given day. It’s tough on family life and I’m starting to feel the strain of it here after about a week of this schedule.

The evils of resident scheduling do give me a renewed appreciation for Rob and his impact on my life and our little family. Earlier I mentioned my propensity to wonder about other possible life paths and it almost surprises me to realize I don’t do this about my marriage. I really can’t imagine life without Robert and I don’t have any desire to. At a stage in our dating relationship when I had more apprehension about marriage than Rob did, he told me he felt confident that he was the right guy for me to marry. It sounded uncharacteristically cocky at the time, and still does, actually, but it turns out that he’s right. Rob’s combination of quirkiness, mellowness, slight tendency to obsess, and seriousness about his faith makes him my ideal husband. Oscar Wilde would be pleased.

I’ve been keeping plenty busy, even with my better half largely absent. Mostly I’ve been working on preparations for getting our house on the market. My parents (who live about 30 minutes from where we’ll probably live) very graciously said I could ship some boxes of stuff to them to get them out of the house for showing it. This is especially kind of them considering the intense aversion my mom has to clutter (which apparently has a strong genetic component). I’ve been boxing up Grace’s outgrown clothes, board games, books, and other things that we can live without for 6 months but don’t want to get rid of and sending it their direction. Do you know how much cheaper media mail is than regular parcel post? It’s quite shocking, and makes it quite a temptation to claim that all your boxes are nothing but books, CDs, DVDs, and the like. I resisted, however. The house is starting to look more neat and less lived in, so we are on our way. A big plan for this week is to call some realtors and start having some scary conversations about prices and listing and whatnot. Aack!