Vegas

 In the middle of December, the week before Christmas I think, we met up with Dj's parents in Las Vegas, they invited us there to see Jeff Dunham (The puppet guy with Achmed the dead terrorist) as a Christmas present. We stayed at Cesear's Palace which is ridiculously nice, his mom found an awesome Cyber Monday deal on the rooms I guess.

 The rooms were the nicest we've ever stayed in. I realized this isn't a good picture and I didn't get one of the bathroom. That was the nicest bathroom I've ever even been in before! It had a huge jetted bathtub and large shower. I'm pretty sure the bathroom alone was classier than our entire apartment, our car, and both of our work places put together.

 While there we visited the Coca Cola store, the bear looked away right before I snapped the picture but you could pay to have a picture taken with a bunch of different back grounds put in.

 

We also went to M&M world. Yeah. Let me just say that if you ever run across raspberry M&Ms at the store, please, buy some bags and ship them to me. I will cover all costs. And then buy yourself some because if you like raspberry and chocolate they are amazing. They are my favorite kind now.

 We ate a bunch of amazing food. I only got pictures from one place, Max Brunner's or something like that. Cyndi, Dj's mom had gone to one in NYC and really wanted us all to try it. I'll just show the dessert. It was a salted caramel shake. If you like the sweet and salty combo, like if you enjoy dipping your french fries in your milk shakes, this shake is for you. Dj couldn't stand it but his parents and I thought it was amazing. So if you're ever near a Max Brunner's, stop in for dessert, it was a pricey milkshake but their desserts are what they are known for.

 

We walked up the strip and saw a bunch of stuff, I won't bore you with a bunch of poor quality ipod pictures but one of the cooler things we did was go to an art exhibit. Cyndi's an artist, anything that has to do with art, she's all over it. So thanks to his talented, cultured mom, Dj and I can say that we've seen real Monet paintings and feel all cultured too.

 And here's boring ol' us. 100 lbs heavier from all the amazing food we had from this trip.

Vegas is crazy, I can honestly say I'd be happy to never ever go back. They smoke inside, there are people trying to hand you ads for girls to you door in 20 minutes. The entire casino experience is a scam, they keep you inside away from windows, where it's warm and full of artificial lights and your time and money slowly slip away. His parents would probably hate me for this but my favorite part of the entire trip was sitting in the hotel room playing Phase 10 and eating the different flavored M&Ms they got while talking and laughing. I had a wonderful time, the food was AMAZING, the room was gorgeous!, and it was really fun to hang out with his parents with just the four of us but that game of Phase 10 was definitely my favorite part.

I didn't fail.

I started school the first full week of January. I was excited and rarin' to go with 7 credits to tackle. But now, nearly three weeks later I have only 2 credits remaining. I spent three nights this past week alone getting home from work at around 4-4:30 starting homework and not stopping for more than a 15 minute dinner break until I went to bed at 8:30-9(Don't judge! Dj's alarm rings at 5:30 and I usually have insomnia on top of that). Last week I dropped my English class because I already took the exact same class at Cuesta and am waiting to hear back from the Records department about getting it counted for credit. But yesterday when I picked Dj up from school we had a long talk about what I should do. I felt like I was doing a great job at work, giving my all in a relatively negative environment. I felt like I was doing great at school, despite the 8-10 hour a week work load from one of my 2 unit classes I still had 100% in both classes(I know, only the first 2 weeks but I felt accomplished). But I felt like I had failed that week at being a wife. We hadn't had more than a few moments to talk all week. Here he was in his Senior year and he had done the dishes, made dinner a few nights, and three loads of laundry all this week while I was working on homework. I felt like a failure because I was realizing that if I kept up the weekly load that I wouldn't be able to be there at all this quarter to support my husband through his final months before graduation. He would have to worry about dinner, cleaning, and keeping his wife from throwing the computer across the room all semester long, something I never wanted him to worry about until he was at least done with school.
So I dropped out of my class. I have one left, a religion class that I really like so far. I had such high ambitions at the beginning of the year and I really wanted to accomplish them, I'm really disappointed that I wasn't able to do it. But I hadn't considered the toll it would take on our marriage and my poor, loving, supportive husband. I didn't fail at being a student. I made realizations about my limits and decided to not ignore them.
I think a large part of the reason I took on so much is because I'm tired of working so much, I wanted to feel like a student again instead of just another 40 hour grind worker. It's definitely a difficult spot to be in. I enjoy aspects of my job but the company I'm at is growing and losing their mom and pop/care about our employees feeling so they haven't been treating us the way they used to. But I also see where I fall short in cleaning our home and doing all the things that a wife usually does. I lose my perspective pretty easily, I feel like I'm just working to pay the bills so that we can survive enough for me to just keep working, if that makes any sense. I forget that this is my role for the family right now, to bring in enough money so that Dj can focus on school. I'm helping him live his dream of higher education.Which means I didn't fail by dropping some of my classes. I'm succeeding in being a supportive wife!
I never imagined I'd still be working full time by the time our 3rd anniversary came around (we're only fourish months away!) but my life is still amazing and I am over the moon happy in my marriage. Who can really ask for more than that?