A Year of Changes

For our little family, 2013 is bound to be different from 2012 for several reasons, some obvious, others not so much.

There is of course the most obvious - the impending birth of our first child this spring. This will no doubt change our lives for the better. Instead of the spouse and rabbit and I, we will now how another noiser mouth to feed, clothe, and cart around with us. I cannot express the level of excitement in the house as we slowly accumulate stuff for our new little man. And yes, that does mean that unless the US was really off, we're having a little boy. I'm still out numbered males to females in the house.

Our camera shy little guy finally gave a decent profile after over an hour

Other highly probable changes due to occur:
We move somewhere new to  accomodate the added human in the household. We're still unsure that we can afford to realistically buy a place in the areas we'd like before the little one is born, but we are trying to get our act together so that if the oppurtunity presents itself we will be able to pounce. We've signed up for a Homebuyers Education Seminar later this month which will earn us a certificate good for 2 years allowing access to lower interest and down payment rates than we'd be able to get without it. Even if we don't buy something, we'll still probably move to a larger rental somewhere hopefully nearby. I'd still like to avoid buying an additional car.

I start on a new MS medication. One big mystery for us is how my immune system will come back post-pardum. That will determine how quickly I need to get back on medication, but I assume that it will more than likely be about 6 months from birth, which would be this coming November. No MS drugs currently on the market are approved for while breastfeeding, so I'd like to avoid going back on something as long as possible but realize that could be anywhere from 3 weeks to 1 year. As a result I need to start researching medications again to try to find the most tolerable. I liked the results I was getting on what I was on previously, but that is no longer an option as I ran out of injection sites.

The hubs starts a new job. With the added mouth to feed, the spouse will most likely be finding either a second part time job or finding one full time job with better pay. This is very much so up in the air, and I have little to no control over any of it, so there's really not much more I can say. We'll see what he finds. I have high hopes for him, but every time I try to push or encourage one direction or another it seems to not really work, so we'll see what happens.

And then there are all of the larger geo-political changes that are going on in the world around us, such as the financial mess caused by our elected officials and our culture of refusing to say no to our wants. It seems like we satisfy our wants while starving our needs. We want to have low taxes, but we also need to ensure that there is a social safety net for those who are unable for a variety of reasons to take care of themselves. Being poor is not a crime and we need to stop penalizing the less fortunate as if they are convicted criminals. The suggestion by many to have mandatory drug testing to receive government assistance won't solve the fraud issue (which when actually investigated is not nearly as rampant as some would have you believe); it will just serve to make people more distrustful of the system. We want to have access to all sorts of firearms as civilians, but we need to take a hard look at our culture of glorifying violence and the tools that allow people to live out those darker tendencies. A firearm may just be a tool for destruction and not in itself able to inflict harm, but the ramifications for those whose carelessness results in someone else taking their tool to commit atrocities are paultry. If I had my way, the registered owner of a weapon that is used for a crime should be able to be charged with aiding and abetting for not properly safeguarding their weapon. It is just a pipe dream of mine, but something has to change.

Life has a funny way of working itself out, and that is without our constant attempts at steering its course. May the new year bring many pleasant surprising and thought provoking challenges.