:: keep is the new quit, or, I AM PSYCHED! ::

i know i've talked about it before, and i swear i'm not trying to harp on it or whatever, but when my hubby and i decided to move home from columbus to rochester in december 2008, we were also deciding a lot of other things: deciding to leave behind my job as a college teacher, deciding for him to take a major pay cut (between those two decisions our household income was halved when we moved), for us to keep evan out of daycare (where he'd been part time for a year in ohio), for us to rent our ohio condo to people we'd never met...

a year later, coinciding with the birth of little emily last december, we had another big decision-making pow-wow. money was tight and the romance of living on a shoestring (and a raggedy old broken one at that) for the sake of moving home-sweet-home was wearing off. we knew that there was the very real possibility that i would have to go back to work. doing something.

who knows what. 


we looked at the numbers and i wrote a figure on a piece of paper. it was the number of dollars that i would need to bring in in 2010 in order to keep the family above water. i would start out trying to do it from home with my then-fledgling little business. that would keep my with my babies (a good and yet a sometimes scary prospect) and save us the financial burden of childcare. but if it didn't seem like that was going to cut it, i'd have to consider seeking work outside the house.

in the year since that pow-wow, there were definitely moments when it seemed like despite everything, we were going to start sinking. there were moments when i was pretty sure i was going to have to polish up my resume and start shopping it around.

but lo and behold, my income for the year has passed the mark. i made more this year than that number i wrote on a piece of paper last december.

that number was 250% of what i made in 2009, and at the time i wrote it, i only half-believed that making that much money was plausible, and maybe only ten-percent-believed that making that much in my business's second year was remotely possible.

it's not enough. we're still scrimping and saving and i'm still pouring much of the profit of this little biz back into the biz itself. we need this business to continue to grow. but i did it. i set a crazy goal and i achieved it. and more than that, i proved to myself (who needed more proving than my husband did - he seemed ridiculously confident in me all along, the poor sap) that this is going to work. the business is going to continue to grow and we're going to continue to thrive and money will stop being such a constant thought in our minds.

there's a lot of hullabaloo over on etsy about quitting your day job and all, and i think that if my day job weren't, you know, raising two kids and running a business, i'd be throwing my hat in the ring for a quit-your-day job feature on etsy's blog. that is to say: if i had a day job, i think that hitting this goal would be enough impetus for me to quit that day job.

i still can't take the vacation everyone on facebook is telling me to take. i mean come ON! but maybe-just-maybe i'll dress myself up and take myself out for a smaller-scale celebration.

whee!