School

Yesterday I took the boys to story time at the public library. They didn't want to participate in any of the songs or other things so we ended up leaving before it was over. Yesterday was an extremely stressful day for us because we discovered just how bad our money issues have become. I felt like all of the life just drained out of me after seeing our credit cards maxed out and bank account in the negative. We have been thinking about all possible options to help our situation. I have been trying to find a part-time job, but we decided it would be impossible. Having only 1 car makes things pretty difficult, but then add in the fact that Ben is on-call every other week and has no real set time off each day he works. So now we are looking into ways to cut costs on bills and food. Today I changed our cell phone plan to save some money, but once our contract is up in about 6 months we might look into switching to a different provider since Verizon seems to be the most expensive out of all of them. We can't switch now because there would be some pricey fees for early termination. I checked with Comcast and we have the absolute cheapest plan for TV & Internet. Our only option there would be to cancel TV which might be required soon. We would like to keep Internet as long as possible. We can't do anything about lowering health insurance, but I am looking into possible state assistance to help with co-pays. We are hoping that our BEG bill will go down since we have not had our AC on for a few weeks and we switched energy providers to somebody cheaper than BGE. Then there is the issue of food...we get WIC which provides milk, bread, eggs, peanut butter, cereal, juice, and some fruit each month for the boys. Ben and I have been planning dinners for a week at a time so we are not eating out like we used to. We will have to start cutting out snacks, desserts, and even meat (not at every meal) until our situation gets better. We have also made the decision to cancel Ryder's swallow study for this week since we don't have the money to pay the co-pays for his last few visits (Zak's also) and we didn't feel right about doing the test knowing a bill would be coming in the mail. We have kept the appointment for the behavior therapy for the end of October and really hope we can afford it then. I just feel like I have lost the fight inside of me because no matter what we try to do we just can't win....

Today Ryder went to school. He is always excited to get on the bus and seems very happy when he gets off the bus. Zak and I ran a few errands today to get WIC stuff and change our cell phone bill. Once we got home we played in the backyard for a while with the dogs. Then I told him it was school time and he was very excited. Today we mainly worked on tracing and matching colors. I had to really mess with the color while editing the pictures so his lines would show up since he draws so lightly.

Around 11:30am we went outside to wait for Ryder's bus. As soon as Ryder's bus comes into our court Zak gets very excited. When Ryder gets off the bus he usually wants me to pick him up and hold him for a bit then we head inside for lunch. While the boys were eating lunch I went through Ryder's backpack and found a booklet he made. This booklet shows some of the pictures/symbols that are used for the PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) that they use at school and we use at home...

I wanted to put this video on here because it is so funny and cute. The picture will be black the whole time because I was standing in the dark hallway videoing the boys talking while they were in the bedroom the other night. We usually put them to bed around 8pm, but recently they have been staying awake until 10pm while in their bedroom talking with each other...