Purps, I've been there, and its' noooo fun. But I'm so glad there was a program available. When I was pregnant with my first child, we moved from San Francisco, where the unemployment rate was the lowest in the country at the time, to where the rest of the family lived. We just couldn't see having a baby in a SF flat with a bunch of lunatic room mates. What we didn't know, was that we moved to where the unemployment rate was the highest. We had to use every drop of savings we had before they would give us anything, so we did. We rented a tiny little cottage for 310.00 a month. I received 325.00 a month in Aid, and 70.00 a month in food stamps. I also gotta WIC, which is a wonderful program I must say. If you are not familiar, they give you coupons for certain foods. You can get cereal, milk, bread, peanut butter, cheese and juice. I think that was about it. The cool thing, is that it could only be certain kinds, nutritious and not sugary. Anyway, that left us 15.00 in cash for the month, and 17.50 a week for groceries. I was very creative with my cooking, but by the third week of the month my mom was bringing over a bag of food. We ran out of gas of course, so my husband would walk to find a job. I finally got a job at 5 months pregnant, which was awfully nice of the guy who hired me, because I obviously wasn't going to be a very spunky or long term employee. My husband worked two crappy jobs. So we took aid for 3 months. We still got medical, but we had a share of cost. Naturally the month he found a good job, and we were no longer eligible for medical, is the month the baby was born. With slight problems, which left us with an Eleven Thousand dollar hospital bill. I remember everything so vividly, because that was our waiting for the new baby time. All the little things that go with that experience. Seems like a million years ago now.
Oh here's something fun though. When he finally got that decent job, it was for a very small company and the owner was a really good guy. He would have contests and stuff to motivate his guys. My husband won the very first month he was there. The prize was something like a weekend in Tahoe or something. We asked him if we could take that amount of money, and spend it on baby stuff. We got a stroller and a care seat and a bunch of things we needed. It was amazing.
