The Little Things

I was going to post about all of the things that I have done in the past couple of weeks which admittedly doesn't amount to much since Jeremy has been busy. But then something awesome happened which sort of trumped everything else.  Jeremy has been a little stressed out while I have been here thanks to these 5-hour long qualifying exams that he is required to take to continue in his program.  He has to take 4 in all and 2 of them this week, one in Classical Mechanics and one in Quantum Mechanics. Believe me, I don't understand it either.

Anyway yesterday he took the day off from studying. Yay! So for date night he took me to a nice dinner and a movie. At dinner after we had some awesome entrees we ordered a molten chocolate souffle.  When it arrived at the table our waiter told us that someone was anonymously paying for our dessert. We spent the rest of dinner trying to figure out who bought it for us which we never did.  But Jeremy and I decided that sometime in the distant future we hope to be sitting in a restaurant and look over and see a young couple and buy them a dessert too.

As I have been reflecting more today on dessert last night and Jeremy's exams I realized just how much grad school consumes your life, no matter if you are in astrophysics or theater.  Because we are doing grad school apart I know that we will let our work consume our lives even more just to help fill the void of us not being there for each other.   Jeremy and I have so many great stories from adventures that we have had together and I don't want those to end while we are apart. So to counteract the work and to continue the adventures I came up with an idea.  Every week we are going to trade off  "daring" each other to do different things and to get photographic evidence of it.  That way even in the midst of craziness in our lives every other week we will have to do something that enriches our lives no matter how goofy it is.  I never want my entire life to be my work and because I am putting off a lot of my own personal wants for grad school (which will be better for my family in the long run) I don't want to lose other parts of my life as well.

So basically my own life lesson for the week: don't forget about the importance of little things (like getting a free dessert) that happen in life because sometimes it is the little things that make the big things (ex. being apart for grad school) worth it.