Me Blog!

Lots of people are writing about their experiences over the past year. Grannymar has a great post on her blog and Grandad has broken his new year resolution already!

As for myself?

To call it a mixed year would be an understatement and it was very definitely a year with very marked highs and lows. There were two prominent life changing highs. First back in April when Sylwia thought that she might be pregnant and of course back in November when Lucas was born.

However there are always going to be highs and lows and with the biggest high being the birth of Lucas, my biggest low was being made redundant. Again back in April, with only a handful of people left in the factory, I was given a choice of keeping my job and moving full time to Vienna or I could accept redundancy. This really put me in a quandry.

If I was in my mid 20′s then I would have been off like a shot. It is hard to explain but it was like it was on my mind that it was time to settle down and think about starting a family. As it happened it was the same week that Sylwia confirmed that she was pregnant so that was my mind made up. I was finally going to become a dad which is what I wanted. Redundancy it was to be. I figured that I wouldn’t be out of work too long so I finished up on the 4th of May and joined the dole queue for what I hoped would only be for a few weeks.

April to November was a time of unbelievable excitement. Trips to the maternity hospital, looking in amazement at the baby scans, preparing for baby. I was due to go on a trip of a lifetime in August which was scuppered by An Post taking three weeks to deliver a registered letter from Dublin with my tickets. But the disappointment of canceling the holiday was offset by the rapidly approaching big day.

Preparing for fatherhood and wondering how we were going to cope financially was a major strain on both of us. By September I had applied for well over two dozen jobs and heard absolutely nothing back from any of them. If I got a rejection letter from any of them then I would have been happy enough, as at least I would have had some acknowledgment. As I’m writing this now, I have applied for 50 jobs and only recieved one rejection letter and sat one interview.

After 7 months on the dole and my redundancy money gone it is easy to start feeling despair but this is offset by watching our little man growing up and the hope that in 2008 a new job will be forthcoming.

Although it is just another day, I wish you and yours the best for the new year.