Miss Mommy the Firefighter

I am so busy putting out fires all the time.  I fear if I stop even for a moment the whole thing might just burst into flames.  That would be bad.  So I keep on dealing with the emergency issues that arise regularly and continue to try to get on top of it all. 

Maybe I need some kind of fire retardant spray to simply mist over the house, the family, the bank account, and whatever else I'm missing to allow me to get out of this position, figure out a way to keep it all under control and maybe even (gasp!) improve things just a little.

I feel as if I cannot focus on any one thing for any length of time because it ultimately results in me unintentionally letting something else slide.  I might spend a good chunk of the day looking through store circulars and coupons in order to create a grocery list that might fit with our extremely tight budget only to get comments from DH (who IS appreciative of the hard work I put into creating said list) about how The Princess is down to her last pair of clean pants and could I PLEASE do her laundry tomorrow.  Or spend a lot of time trying to revise our basic behavior modification for the kids to attempt to improve life at home only to find out that I somehow missed paying a credit card bill (even though I thought I had everything automated).

Here are the issues:

• Money is so extremely tight, but those darn kids still want to eat on a regular basis!  Don't worry, I'm kidding, I feed the kids, but it really is tough figuring out HOW to buy all those groceries and still pay the mortgage. 

I thought I had a solution with refinancing the house, but after paying almost $500 for the appraisal, the underwriter had a problem with the fact that no one can find the permit from when we converted our garage into a playroom way back in 2004 when I was 700 months pregnant with The Princess) and things ended up taking much longer than expected.  Ultimately the company is still willing to work with us, but since the bank that currently holds our mortgage is now going to take about three to four weeks to do whatever it is on their end that they do to basically sign the mortgage over to the new company, they want an additional $700+ to lock in the rate they promised us.  "But don't worry - you can just turn that over and include it with the rest of the loan."  Uh...no, I don't think so.  As it stands, the house was appraised lower than we expected, which increased how much we were going to be borrowing, and now this?

The biggest problem is that apparently both of our credit scores are very low right now.  This sucks!  I think the most important thing at this point is to work towards increasing our scores by making sure EVERY bill gets paid on time and do everything we can to pay down our debt.  Of course, when we're scrambling just to make sure the electric bill can get paid this month, it's a little hard to find any extra money to put towards our debt, let alone towards rebuilding our emergency fund.

If you want to read more about the scintillating tale of how I'm trying to get rid of our debt and not starve to death, check out my new blog!

• Trying to meet each of the three kids' needs feels like it is getting harder every week.  The Princess goes back and forth between being responsible and downright likeable to whining and doing every attention-seeking negative behavior in the world.  Twin B is so sensitive and so needy and wants to tell me stories all the time but it takes him so incredibly long to relay even just one story I feel like I'm losing my mind.  And then there's Twin A.  His ADHD and Asperger's have collided to create the perfect storm of neediness that is challenging the fact that I ever described myself as a patient person.

• I need to lose weight - forty pounds, to be exact.

If you want to read all about my exciting journey (I figure if I describe it as "exciting" maybe I'll actually begin to believe it) to lose weight and get in shape, check out my new blog!

Yes, that was TWO plugs for my other blog.  Do you have a problem with that?

• This new computer SUCKS!  It is soooo slow and freezes up all the time, making everything I do all day online take even longer than it should, and yet I have no money for a better one.

• I need to complete eighty more Continuing Education Hours in order to reactivate my teaching certificate and even begin to sub again, let alone potentially get a full-time teaching job again.  And between trying to figure out how to continue paying the mortgage each month, making sure each kid is functioning appropriately both at home and at school, determining the best buys at the grocery stores so we can actually eat, making food that everyone will eat - especially Twin A whose current ADHD meds kill his appetite, trying to make time to go to the gym on a regular basis, ensuring everyone has clean underwear and socks to wear, making sure every bill has been paid without causing us to bounce any checks, I have not found enough time to complete the on-line self-paced courses I need to complete to make that happen. 

And that's about all the time I have to share for now.  The kids will be walking through the door in twenty minutes, and I still have to unload and reload the dishwasher, season the chicken and chop up the potatoes and celery and put them all in the oven, fold the load of laundry that just finished drying plus switch the wet load into the dryer and put a new load into the washer, and clean off the table on which they will do their homework and try to think of a healthy snack for them all to eat since they will undoubtably be "starving." 

And I never made it to the gym again.