The Incident

About a week ago I experienced such an intense craving for chocolate chip cookies that I decided I had to bake some from scratch at once. My three old daughter and husband decided to join me as sous chefs while we excitedly turned on the stand mixer to begin throwing chocolaty chip cookie goodness into it with not a second thought. As we passed the ingredients from pantry to mixer , my husband turned to me and said :

"This is not normal...What happened to us?"

Now if you knew of our past, you might think my husband was referring to our comfortable domesticity as opposed to the hard partying ways of our youth, and in a way he may have been, or perhaps to our lax attention to the words "in moderation" when it comes to sweets but, at that exact moment in time he was referring to the fact that it was one in the morning and we were baking cookies with our daughter as though it were one in the afternoon.

What had happened to us?

In the weeks building up to the one in the morning cookie baking incident we had really begun to let ourselves go; staying up way past our bedtimes, eating junk, watching excessive amounts of bad television and abusing our Netflix subscription. Though as a young couple we had once spent our days sleeping and our nights out, as a family we had been relatively normal with sleeping children by 8 pm and alarm clocks set for work in the morning. There was only one plausible answer for what was responsible for the change.

"That's the wacky world of unemployment, for you," I said.

Yes, it was true my husband had been unemployed for nearly two and half months and I hadn't had a real job, excluding my sporadic substitute teaching gigs, since I had been pregnant with my daughter four years prior. We sat in the kitchen eating our delicious chocolate chip cookies and wondered in what other ways unemployment had changed our lives and standards. We enjoyed more time together but seemed to be doing less with it. I personally felt stuck in a cycle of sleeping in and watching all six seasons of Lost. Something had to give.

And that's when I decided to be reborn as a blogger. I give to you my friends the wacky misadventures of the unemployed.