Welfare, mischief and general update.

Well my husband is still job hunting. No luck yet. He actually had an interview about six weeks ago but he wasn't hired. Honestly, he believes he wasn't hired because he's over qualified and he's probably right.

We're in an awkward situation right now. Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances my husband is trying to make a go of a business that was given every possible disadvantage there is. There's a whole history in why he's there, lots of family loyalty, worry for his parents and their financial situation and an evil sales representative that had it out for my FIL, the former owner of this business.

So my husband is trying to get this turkey going, and it's getting there, slowly but he's job hunting at the same time. While job hunting three other major businesses in town have either closed or had major layoffs. Sorry, restructuring *eye roll* That leaves hundreds looking for jobs in a town of only fifty thousand. Not a good situation.

However after much thought and prayer we've decided we need to stay where we're at. We have a fixed mortgage rate of four and a half percent. We had to refinance twice to get it that low, it was totally worth it. We also only have a decade left on our mortgage. Our first mortgage and first refinance on this house were thirty year loans. The second refinance, we got a sweet fifteen year mortgage with that uber low interest rate.

We talked about moving, this house is small for us. There are three very small bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs. It's about two thousand square feet and we use pretty much every inch. The biggest bedroom downstairs is crammed with Kent's office and my sewing stuff. At one time we each had our own rooms and it was wonderful! But the Lord had plans for us and sent the twins, we put in an egress window in the smaller bedroom and the girls are now downstairs. My husband and I are sharing space. It would go a lot smoother if he'd stop stacking random computer parts on my fabric stash.

When times were better and we talked of moving I always had the same thought come into my head. That thought was the advice we've been given by our latter day prophets on living within our means. That means housing too and now I have a better understanding of why we've been given that council.

It's not just living within our means, it's an attitude of frugality that we should embrace. Saving money for emergencies, having a food storage, growing a garden when possible. It's a way of life and we've tried to follow that way of life.

I'll be the first to admit it's saved our cans the past five months. During this time we've had no income, we've payed all our bills, utilities and mortgage without help. We've also dipped into our food storage relying on it.

We have a decent food storage, we have wheat, dehydrated potatoes and other vegetables, dehydrated fruit, tvp, canned meat, veggies, fruit. We have oats, corn, rice and somewhere in the basement we have two five gallon buckets with sugar in it. That's not enough for our family of seven if we're talking a year but throw in our dozen 12 pound buckets of honey and about 40 pounds of molasses, we can stretch it out quite a bit.

We suffer a bit from pride, we weren't going to ask for any help at all. However I confided to a friend about our situation the day before she became Relief Society president. The Lord works in mysterious ways. *wink* She came to us with a food order and we've been on church welfare for three months now. Since our savings and tax returns have payed the bills, we've been receiving help with groceries.

At first we were really uncomfortable with this. After all, we do have our food storage and isn't that what's it's for? Then Kent went to a Stake welfare meeting and learned the Stake President has made it his mission to get help to families in potential financial trouble before they lose homes and the church can no longer help. Why, that's us!

We immediately felt relief. We've humbled ourselves and have gratefully received groceries from the church.

There's a few things I won't get though. We are on WIC and with the three little boys we get fourteen gallons of milk a month. If we run short, I insist we use our dry milk. Kent really doesn't like it, but that's why we have it! I feel very strongly about not taking more then we need and it's been a huge blessing. Of course I hope and pray soon we can move on.

Understanding our situation can help you appreciate the frustration I feel when my children waste food. It's bad enough a cereal box isn't put up and the twins take it out in the yard and feed the ants but sometimes my children treat food like it's a toy.

The brand of dehydrated milk we buy is called Moo's Milk, it's pretty tasty actually, much better then the powdered milk I grew up with in the seventies. Like all dairy products, the price has gone up. Where we last bought it for $76.00 a fifty pound bag it's now up over a hundred bucks a bag. That makes what we have extra precious. Every little bit is gold when you have no income coming in.

So when my almost four year old came to me to ask for a glass of kool-aid and I noticed a fine ivory powder over his hands, chest, feet and in his hair, my heart sunk. I knew it was the powdered milk.

I had a five gallon bucket in the kitchen that I was working out of. About four years ago we discovered gamma seal lids. Truly a wonderful invention. There's a threaded seal that goes around the rim of the bucket and a screw in lid that fits the seal. It makes it so much easier to work out of buckets, especially when you have as much stuff stored in buckets as we do! The downside, little boys that *L*I*K*E* *T*O* *P*L*A*Y*. This is especially frustrating since I have three to try to keep the reigns on.

When my was visiting, she tried really hard to not laugh every time she found a lock on a door or cupboard. She didn't succeed but she did try.

Thank you for that mom.

Anyway, kid, covered in ivory dust. I immediately looked for the bucket. I've spent so long not understanding my speech impaired kids I have a bad habit of not even asking Ean obvious questions. It would save so much time and he's still at that wonderful age where he mostly spits out the truth. Eventually I found the bucket. It had been about a third full, so maybe twenty pounds of moo's milk. It was all dumped on the cement pad in the back yard.

It obviously was being used as a sand box. Ironically the kids had dumped the sand from their sand box onto the cement pad about six weeks ago. So they had a sandbox. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr

There were foot prints through the milk and not just kid but kitty and doggy footprints too. Frankly I'm shocked the dog didn't roll in it. Wouldn't a carpet of dry milk be the doggy equivalent of a person rolling on money heaped on a bed? The milk's been shoveled and swept but I'm still catching the dog licking the cement.

Throw in the pancake syrup from a week ago and there's a lot of waste going on at my house. Oh yeah, the pancake syrup. Well we had this big container of syrup, there was about a half gallon left and I was serving scones for dinner. Now I made honey butter to go with the scones but my weird girls were determined to have pancake syrup on their scones. Blech!

The girls are responsible for clearing the table each day after dinner. However the lure of a beautiful spring day beckoned to them and they left the house to ride bikes. I think I was doing something really important like playing on the computer but I'd been working on the house all day and figured i deserved a break. I heard a noise in the kitchen (a twin making mischief noise) and went to check the table.

Oh my HELL!

Two two year olds and a half gallon of pancake syrup are not a good mix. What made it extra frustrating was that I had specifically reminded my ten year old to put the syrup away right before I left the table.

We're talking an inch layer over half the table. Syrup finger painted on the walls, the stuff that pooled in chairs and of course the sticky lake that now existed under the table. Did I forget to mention the syrup twins that had their clothes GLUED onto them? Dave was literally stuck to the table! I did what any sane parent would do, I got my husband as back-up because I knew I was not in the right state of mind to be "fair" and "reasonable".

Then I got the girls.

Kent was very fair, they needed to clean the entire mess and no syrup for a month. That reminds me, I need to make pancakes soon...

The girls worked hard for about twenty minutes and then fizzled into a fit of silliness that could not be contained. There was shrieking, running, thumping and door slamming. I could not put a stop to it because I was nursing two very sad boys with colds so they could go to bed in a few minutes. Apparently washing syrup out of hair is almost as traumatic as dental surgery had been the week before. Who knew?

Kent disappeared downstairs so I was on my own. I was peeved with those girls and I knew the mess had hardly been touched. What I didn't know is that Jane had mopped the floor. This means she wet the mop and spread the sticky over pretty much the entire kitchen. Kate had carefully cleaned the table and chairs all around the puddles. It looked like weird abstract art with these raised spots that had stuff stuck in them. there was a fair amount of sticky spread around the table too. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse.

Dave coughed. Not just any cough but a deep gut wrenching, I'm hacking up a lung cough. Very hard to hear your child sick. Even worse when it's your gag reflex kid. Yuppers, the kid hurled right on my face, across my pillow and onto our bed.

I loudly instructed Jane to go get her father. She came back and told me he was on the phone.

Grumble grumble grumble.

So I washed up, cleaned the kid again. Stripped my bed, threw my sheets and pillow in the wash and realized what a grand disaster the girls had made in the kitchen. That was when Kent finally came up.

Was I annoyed, frustrated or frazzled? I think a more accurate word would be irate, in laymans terms, I was ticked. Kent mentioned that when Jane came down he thought I was just asking for help getting the kids ready for bed. I was working hard to not loose it completely. I got after the girls, dumped a half gallon of water on the floor, got a pile of clean prefolds and instructed Jane to get on her hands and knees and use a clean prefold until it got dirty and then get another clean one, so as to not just spread the sticky. I then quickly did some wiping on the chairs, not wishing to press my luck on trusting Kate to actually get them.

And then Kent helpfully mentioned that I should have given Dave cough medicine.

*exasperated sigh*

I did, he threw the damn stuff up!

So I medicated the kid again, put on my shoes and suggested that Dave and Greg be put into bed. Kent said he didn't think that was a good idea just yet. OK, if you want him honey, he's yours. They are all yours!! I grabbed the ergo, put Ean on my back and met the neighbor to go for a walk. I could not take one more minute in the house!!!!!

Boy did my thighs feel that walk. After all I was carrying an almost forty pound weight on my back. I move a lot slower with an almost four year old on my back.

My neighbor's youngest was jealous that Ean was getting to go. I mentioned he was more luggage then anything else, he wasn't playing or jumping.

By the time I got back, I had cooled off enough to appreciate the work the girls had done. With a parent sitting right on top of them, they can do amazing work! *laugh* The twins were in bed and the girls gladly left the kitchen to go to bed.

I use to keep all my regular use bulk items (flour, sugar, rice, moo's milk etc) in five gallon buckets. I've been forced to move everything into smaller containers so I can lock it safely in my pantry. If I leave anything out even on the counter, someone will get into it. The twins love flour, Kate eats sugar in any form and Ean loves pretty much everything.

The twins are also garbage guts. Anything with food property they try to eat so I often find chewed up pectin boxes and sucked on cheese packs (from mac and cheese boxes) on the kitchen floor. It sure makes it hard to be frugal, hard to save, hard to keep stuff on hand. The worst part is they often destroy items that we can't replace from the Bishop's storehouse. The Bishop's storehouse is the LDS church's grocery store for welfare shopping. You find them in high LDS population areas. This leaves me with the option of spending money that we have budgeted to the penny or going without. Often we go without.

I should mention that in the past thirteen years of marriage we've never received help from the church before. I thought it was humbling the first time I went but I was wrong, it's far more humbling after the third month of receiving welfare.

Still we are counting our blessings. We have a home. Keeping our life in this world in perspective, that means we are incredibly rich compared to those impoverished nations that have so little. I need to remember my blessings not just today but when times are good again because we are blessed.