The Small Sacrifices

You know, I have found that living through a chain of events is nothing compared to taking a step back and taking in the "Reader's Digest" version.  Seth has been reading along with all of you at home and he has commented on a few occasions that he has been almost wowed reading and revisiting all of the emotion. It seems to be the most difficult thing to live through the moment, but when you can take a step back, it is easier to see- yes, the heartache, but also the blessings. The blessing that we lived through it. We made it through. We are here and that place in time has already passed. I'm hoping that I can take this feeling with me and look back on the difficult time I am having now and be filled with the blessing of knowing...Yes, it was hard, but we made it through.

To Resume the Story:

We are in the thickness of it all. No working car, low money and mounting medical bills. September 23rd, 14 weeks pregnant and bleeding. At least the rest of my family is healthy.

After a few days of being stuck with no vehicle, it's action day because we need to get to the grocery store. We are still being optimistic that the car's only problem is the battery, so I scour prices on the internet to see what the damage may be. Seth has been working hard and with some help he gathers the extra money to pay for a new battery and labor. We call upon Pop a Lock and have success again. We have a 30 minute drive to the dealership (price of battery, plus labor at our dealership was a better deal than buying a single battery at a parts store) and pray that we make it through the drive. It is so nerve wracking for me, being a planner, to not know. Uncertainty and I aren't the best of friends. Thankfully, it didn't take long for them to report back to us that is was just an old battery. We didn't know because we assumed when we bought it 2 years ago that it would have a new if not new-ish battery. Relief.

When we got home, I spent some time looking at my discharge papers from the ER. Like the other doctor's visit, the ER doctor referred us to an OB who had an office in the building next to the hospital. Since the car fiasco was settled, we called the OB office to get a quote. The answer was almost too good to be true. 

They weren't asking for large amounts of money up front like all the others, just a series of deposits. $500 deposit for the first appointment and $2900 deposit due by the 7th month. Also, like we had found out before, it would be an extra $200 per sonogram and $100-300 for lab work to be billed and paid separately. They couldn't tell us how much it would be in total, but we already knew it would be in the ten thousands based on the multitude of phone calls we had made earlier. We still had 3 months until we had to come up with the larger deposit and $500 for the first appointment seemed to make getting prenatal care within our reach.

Like a lot of you know, when you make a budget for your home, you have to also budget in extra money or else it will not be there. Well, at this point in time, our budget could only accommodate for household bills and grocery items exactly, with meals planned to the day. Seth continued to work hard at his businesses and we tried to save up the extra money as quickly as possible. When things weren't going as speedy as we'd hoped, we had to visit our quick cash options. Sell our stuff.

When we moved from Spokane to Austin, we sold the bulk of our belongings, bringing over only a television and computer, baby stuff like highchair, bouncy and toys, and our clothes (and whatever other small things we stuffed into the storage pod that we couldn't sell or part with) . No couch or beds or kitchen furniture. No pots or pans, dishes or cups. We wanted to start fresh. 

When it came time to inventory our belongings to see what we were willing to part with, we found that we didn't have much. We had consolidated during the move and had only bought what we needed up until now. There were a few random electronics that we thought would sell, some beauty items that I had, and some toys from Evelyn's stash. It really wasn't enough to get a hundred dollars from. There was one thing that we had stored in the closet that held value, not just monetarily, but emotionally. Seth's drums (not drum set, but percussion instruments like congas and bongos, timbales etc). Percussion has been Seth's passion since high school. It is in his veins. He is very talented. He toured nationally and internationally with a small band for a few years after high school and has never lost the love of performing. That's why Austin was such a treat for the musician inside of him. When the time was right, he wanted to try and find a small group to play with for fun, for the artistic release. Most landlords and neighbors in apartments do not like you to play any kind of musical instrument, and with good reason. So, in the closet they stayed. Until now.

It was the first thing he went for when we were trying to decide what to do. They could get us close to a thousand dollars. My heart couldn't handle it. I wouldn't let him give up that important piece of himself. When another week passed and the bleeding continued, the pressure was getting to all of us. He came to me sometime that week very happy. He had a buyer for the drums. He put them up for sale without me knowing. I was sad and relieved at the same time. Lucky for my guilty heart, the sale did not go through. Unlucky for the prenatal situation, we didn't have the deposit. I told him it wasn't meant to be and that we would find another way.