Poor Javy

Javy's true passion in life is sports. That's always been his passion and it probably always will. He's decided he wants to be a professional football player, and who am I to squash that dream? I do everything I can to support him and help him be successful in sports.

This year he has finally started playing football through school, they call it "modified". He's absolutely loving it, it's his first time playing real football.

Well, two days ago the silly child cuts his hand pretty bad in his locker. I had to go pick him up from school and take him to the doctor, where he ended up getting 3 stitches on his middle finger.

So, then the doctor tells us Javy can't play football or participate in Phys. Ed. for 3 weeks!! I'm thinking "Are you nuts??" It's just a little cut on his finger!

So I told Javy to ignore all that and go to football practice anyways. Unfortunatly the school nurse and the coach both told Javy that school rules state he's not allowed to play with stitches!! Ugh!! However, he still has to attend practices even if he can't play or participate!!

So the doctor who stitched Javy's finger said no sports for 3 weeks!! He's going to get the stitches out in 2 weeks... by then he'll have already missed the first game.

He's heartbroken, and so am I. This is such a blow to him. I'm hoping to find a way to shorten his wait time and get him back in football before that first game. I'd hate to see him miss it.

Summer is Over!

Summer has come to an end. The children went back to school yesterday. What an eventful day that was. Javy is now in football through school, they call it "modified" which is basically one step under JV. He has practice immediately after school, and it lasts until 5:15pm... every single day!! School is not walking distance, and of course the buses won't stay that late, so I've got to drag all the kids out during our usual dinner hour to go get him! Thankfully that only lasts through October.

In October Tristan will be starting her dance classes. We signed her up for all 3 classes this year, ballet, jazz, and tap. What were we thinking?? Now we're wondering how we're coming up with all that money!

Last year Tyler was in Soccer which went September and October. We haven't signed him up for that yet this year, although I'm sure he'd love to do it. We just don't seem to have an extra dime to our name these days.. but don't get me started on that!!

I have been trying to get Aydan into Head Start, which was a long, drawn out process. He was finally approved, but their classes are already full. If there's an opening during the school year he may be able to get in, but I'm not holding my breath.

For now I'm just going to enjoy the semi-peaceful days of having just Aydan and Mathieu at home with me. At least I don't have to worry much about the older kids getting bored and needing stimulation. Aydan and Mathieu do pretty well at entertaining themselves, and they don't NEED me to take them somewhere everyday like the older kids did.

Although I must say we did have a decent summer, I still felt it wasn't good enough for the kids. When I was young I remember going camping and swimming at the lake and things like that. I can't really afford to take my kids on trips like that, and we didn't exactly have the perfect weather this year either. We did a few fun things, including going to an amusement park and the State Fair, but I still felt rather bad that their summer wasn't memorable enough.

Perhaps my guilty feelings are due to our current situation, living in this trailer park. For the last 3 years we had a house in a wonderful neighborhood. We had a large yard, and great neighbors who all had kids for mine to play with. No pool, but at least I could hook up a hose or fill up a little wading pool on hot days. It was also very nice to just go for walks through our neighborhood.

Now we live in a small trailer park right off the highway. There's nowhere to walk except for around the trailer park. We have no yard to speak of, and certainly no hook up for a hose on hot days.

Basically this boils down to needing to frequent the local playgrounds to allow the children to let off some steam and get some exercise. On hot days we must visit the pool or beach or something, which costs quite a bit of money for a family this size, and not something I can afford to do as often as needed.

That, along with some of the other downfalls of living in a trailer park are pushing me to think about moving out a lot sooner than we planned. I try very hard to stay upbeat about the situation, knowing we can't really afford much else, and our credit just sucks so owning our own home anytime soon is not an option!! But some days staying up beat about it is far too difficult!!

Surprise Surgery

As I sit here typing this blog I am home, recovering from the surgery I had yesterday morning.

It actually starting on Sunday, 3 days ago. I was having some cramps in my lower abdomen and had begun bleeding although I knew it wasn't that time of the month, that had only been a couple weeks ago.

I let it go that day, dulling the pain with some ibuprofen, but I made an appointment to see my doctor on Monday morning.

My doctor took some blood and urine tests, but "guessed" that my pain was mostly caused by my IUD shifting. I'd had this IUD for over a year already, and never had a problem with it before, but of course there is a first time for everything. So I scheduled an ultra sound and an appointing with an ob/gyn to take a look at my IUD.

Unfortunately the pain became worse that evening, and I forced myself to go to the ER.

After a four and a half hour wait I was finally called back into a room. Then another hour and a half wait and a doctor finally came in to look at me. She did a pelvic exam, noticed the IUD appeared to still be in place, but she too assumed it had probably just shifted and that was causing my pain and bleeding. She gave me some pain pills and told me to just stick with the course of action already planned by my regular doctor.

So I got dressed and I'm sitting in the ER room awaiting my discharge papers seriously cursing myself out for wasting nearly 7 hours for absolutely nothing!! Then the doctor comes back in and says "I have bad news." According to my urine test, I'm pregnant!!

Of course this came as a huge shock and nothing she said afterwards even registered with my brain. I had the IUD for almost a year and a half and never before had I had a problem. Obviously I hadn't gotten pregnant so I'd thought it had been doing it's job.

Plus I just have to mention here that Jay did get a vasectomy while I was pregnant with Aydan. Of course well over a year after that we found out we were pregnant with Mathieu. So it just seems to me that no matter what I do I'm cursed (or blessed) to just continue getting pregnant.

So they called in the ultra sound technician and sent me off to do that. Believe it or not my IUD had not moved or shifted, it was exactly where it was supposed to be. So how on earth did I get pregnant? Well that's the million dollar question, isn't it?

Unfortunately (or fortunately, however you want to look at it) the pregnancy was not in my uterus... it was in my fallopian tubes, otherwise known as an Ectopic Pregnancy.

So, I had to undergo surgery to remove the pregnancy. They also removed my IUD, which obviously wasn't working; did a D&C, which is standard procedure after a lost pregnancy; and since the doctor had trouble finding which side the pregnancy was on, I lost both of my fallopian tubes, which is just fine by me because obviously I have no intentions of attempting another pregnancy!

However, with the luck my husband and I seem to have, I'm still figuring it's only a matter of time before I wind up pregnant again.

Kids Bowl Free

If you live in the U.S. you can go to www.kidsbowlfree.com, find a participating bowling center near you, and register your children under 15 for free bowling! You'll be able to print coupons good for 2 free games per day until the end of August!

I registered a couple days ago and went today for the first time. Bowling is not something we do very often, but it was free, so why not?

The kids had a great time, and we're all looking forward to going again!

Just A Walk In The Woods...

Sundays are typically our family day. We do our best to find some sort of family activity to do together. Sometimes it's going to the zoo, or just playing at a playground.

This week we decided to go to Beaver Lake Nature Center. We'd never been there before, and I'm surprised it took us so long to try it. It only cost $2 to visit. Mostly it's just a bunch of nature trails, one of them completely looping the lake! There was an actual nature center building with a bit of information about some of the wildlife we may see along the trails, which we found quite interesting.

After browsing the center we decided to walk the Bog Trail, which was only supposed to be a little over half a mile one way, but with Mathieu walking and us taking our time to look at things and point things out to the kids, it ended up taking us a good 2 hours to complete!

This is certainly something we'll be doing again! I feel an enormous sense of pride getting my children in touch with nature and teaching them bits and pieces about the Earth and environment while we're hiking!

If you have a nature center near you, I suggest planning a visit with your whole family.

So it continues...

My difficult situation only continues to get worse. It honestly has not let up at all in about a month!

We'd finally gotten Jay's car fixed, and killed ourselves to do it. We had to buy the parts and pay the mechanic which meant putting off bills again and playing catch up again. My van... still not fixed, and we'll somehow have to come up with the money for that.

Our bank account has been negative for a month already, and the car repairs just made that drag on even longer.

So this week we had to pay our rent, and we didn't even have enough to do that. Basically we purposely overdrew the bank account in order to pay rent, and if you ask me, that's pretty darn low!

So we've gone all week with no money, which we're not at all used to doing. We've also been running out of everything as we go. We have no milk now, no eggs, we're almost out of bread, we used our last stick of butter last night. So basically we have nothing to eat and I don't even have the means to make something.

We just kept thinking we'd only have to make it until Thursday. On Thursday I can write a check at the store which won't cash until Friday (can you tell we've done this before?). I also planned on visiting the food pantry again on Thursday to help with our groceries this week so we can hopefully finish playing catch up and be okay.

So, here it is Wednesday morning. Jay gets up and gets ready for work, comes back in the house a minute later... his car won't start!!! He thinks it's an ignition coil this time.

Certainly not something we wanted to deal with! We're already stressed and worn out...

*sigh*

How much lemonade does one really need?

This past Monday I went out to run some errands. I brought the boys to the playground, and on the way back stopped at the Credit Union. I left the Credit Union and my van began acting up. It started sputtering. I knew I was low on gas, but my gas gauge had been acting up, so I wasn't sure just how low. So, I immediately knew I was running out of gas. I panicked a little, because it had been years since I've run out of gas, and I was in the middle of a very busy intersection. At first I debated whether I could make it to the gas station. I began to pull around the corner, as that was my only option at the moment, but my car was no longer moving. It was still running, but stepping on the gas pedal wasn't making it go anywhere.

So, there I sat on the side of an extremely busy road with my 2 youngest boys in the back seat. I don't own a cell phone, so I was basically stranded. I put the car in neutral and tried to push it by myself, something I'd obviously never done before because I had no idea how heavy it was! I thought being in neutral it wouldn't be that difficult, it would just roll along.. but it takes a whole lot of effort to get it going! Wow!

Finally, after perhaps 10 minutes of panic and thinking about my next move, someone finally stopped to offer help. He helped push my van into the KFC driveway, although we couldn't get it up the incline, so there it sat in the driveway. He also let me use his phone and I called Jay who was at work, thankfully I was right down the road.

A little while later Jay shows up with a gallon of gas. He puts it in and tries to start the car, nothing. He takes off to get another gallon, puts it in, still nothing. He kept trying for almost an hour, until we finally had to leave in order for me to get home in time for the other kids. In the end we used his Durango to push my van into a parking spot at KFC.

Jay went back later with his co-worker, added yet another gallon of gas, and tried a few different things, yet still could not get the car started. So it sat there overnight in the KFC parking lot.

Tuesday evening Jay and an acquaintance of his managed to get the van to Aaron's (where Jay works), but still could not get it started.

But then, on Jay's way home Tuesday night, a belt broke on his car! He made it home, but figured the car wouldn't start after that, because after the belt broke the car was just going on battery power. UGH!!

Wednesday was Jay's day off, and we were stranded at home with no vehicle what so ever. He went tinkering with his car and managed to get it started, so drove it to a garage nearby where he and his family have gotten their vehicles worked on for over 20 years! Once there he's told they won't be able to get to his car today, and of course now the car will not start, so Jay had to walk home from there!

Later he's told that on top of the belt needing to be replaced, he's also blown the water pump and that will need to be fixed before the car will work.

So, here it is Friday, and we still have no vehicle. My van is still sitting down at Aaron's. Jay has a customer who's quite knowledgeable about vehicles who's supposed to be coming to take a look at mine, he thinks he knows what's wrong and how to fix it, so we're waiting on him for that. The garage where Jay's car is at is extremely busy and although they have the parts they need, and we've even given them a payment towards the work, we probably won't get that car back until Monday.

So we're stranded at home, and to make matters worse, the kids have been off school since Wednesday for their summer vacation.

It really wouldn't be that bad if we weren't living in a trailer park!! We basically have no yard what so ever and no place for the kids to go play. I don't know the people in this trailer park that well so I won't let the kids just go explore (the last trailer park we lived in was a nightmare and Javy kept getting beat up whenever he left our house).

I planned on spending the summer elsewhere, like driving to playgrounds and parks and pools and beaches, stuff like that. So sitting here without a car is really torture on all of us!

The kids have been on their absolute worst behavior which is not helping matters at all!!

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, due to our car repairs and other bills coming up, we're flat fricken broke again, like as bad as we were a few weeks ago!! For the next 2 or 3 weeks we're going to be short on grocery money again!

I'm not going to ask if things can get any worse, because I know they can, but man oh man I wish it would stop!!