Still Lucky

Wow!  It's been four years. I am a bad, bad blogger!

We did get pretty busy with having four extra kids. My last post detailed all the wonderful ways in which we were blessed after we took in my nieces and nephews. We were given a good queen size bed. People brought us groceries. We got help with Christmas presents through two different charity organizations. We'd just gotten stable enough to get off food stamps, but soon figured out we needed that back, so I reapplied and we were able to get about $500 a month in food stamps, which was amazingly helpful.

When we took the kids in, I was not working much; my medical transcription job had been cut severely as doctors began to use voice recognition technology and did not need transcribers. I was down to an hour of work a day or so on that. I got some work doing freelance writing, but it took tons of time and brought me very little money.

A few months later, I went on an interview for a company my best friend worked for.  It is based out of our teeny tiny hometown, and I get to work from home still.  I do have a set schedule, though. The job is in customer support, so I answer phones, emails, and chats, and as we are a pretty small company, I wear a lot of other hats too; proofreader, trainer, organizer, spreadsheet maker and editor, special project manager, etc. Most days I really like my job.  Most customers are fine people, and my coworkers remain cooperative, funny, and amazing in many ways.

To train for the job, which requires me to do support for seven different websites we own, I had to be out of town for weeks.  I'd train for a week with one customer support rep, go home for the weekend, and then train the next week with a different person. I'd rotate back to the start when I had been to everyone's houses. It was difficult to get through, as we only had one van, which I had to take, and my husband was left with seven kids to take care of. Luckily, it was summer by this time and he didn't have to worry about getting them to school, but he did have to get to work five days a week and get them to appointments (when we took in the kids, their teeth were terrible and each one needed at least three visits to pull teeth, fill cavities, etc). My in-laws were instrumental and we could not have done it without them. They babysat, took my husband to work, and helped deal with an outbreak of lice that lasted for months because I simply did not have time to comb through seven heads every night.

It wasn't long after the kids moved in that their mom went to Georgia. I am still not sure why she went, but she rode along with some friends and eventually they left her there, and she's been there ever since, no ID, no car, no possessions.

We organized our large basement so that the younger kids were on one side and the older on the other side.  As they got older, we divided them with boys on one side and girls on the other side.  the basement is sort of separated by the stairway, so they have their own spaces, sort of.

We made do. Eventually, with my job, we stopped getting food stamps. The kids are still all on Medicaid, thankfully. It is still difficult to feed the kids on our budget, but I menu plan and we do go to Family Services when we need to, such as now, right after the holidays. You never know what you're going to get from them; one time we got an entire cheesecake. Usually we get a lot of cube steak, but one time we got sirloin and New York steaks. One year my father in law was able to get a buffalo permit from the tribe and both he and my husband got a buffalo. That fed us for a whole winter and boy did I get spoiled on buffalo burger; it's quite a bit tastier than beef. We just had to pay for the processing of the meat.

The help we get has slowed down, but the school still asks us sometimes if we need snow boots, if we need help paying for instrument rentals, etc.We are still grateful. We are still a family. We are still very, very, lucky.