No baby yet - though the Braxton-Hicks are getting less charming and more painful so that every once in a while I wonder if it's a REAL contraction.

Steve got home last week, but was sick all week and is just starting to get better. Sometime last week I balanced our checkbook and realized that if all of our checks got cashed we'd be $45 overdrawn. We were expecting a check in the mail for the job that Steve just finished, but it STILL hasn't come. It didn't feel like a good environment to bring a baby into the world last week. The bank account felt like a time bomb. Over the weekend, Steve did some work for a friend, who gave him $40 and he scoured the house for loose bills and change and came up with $10, so this morning he is going to go and deposit exactly $45 in cash into the bank. It is such relief. I bought water and dog food with the other quarters last night.

I have to keep telling Aidan that we don't have any money because he wants to go places and do things. It's amazing how everything requires money - I only have a quarter tank of gas so I don't even want to go anywhere that doesn't cost money. I've been thinking about life in a more primitive/moneyless economy and how almost everything that we do costs money.

The other night Aidan asked me what we would do if we ran out of food. (We have plenty). I told him we'd eat Wes. Then, we played a game naming all of the silly things we would eat - the walls, our clothes, eyes (then we couldn't see!), ears (then we couldn't hear!), the roof (then the snow would come in!). Then Aidan said we could go to the store and steal the food. I tried to keep dissuading him from that line of thinking, but I think it was inconceivable to him that there could be hungry people and a store full of food and that the hungry people couldn't have some. And he's right - it's pretty mindblowing when you think about it. We'll have to discuss dumpster diving the next time it comes up.

Does it all sound pretty grim? It's not. It's really just a cashflow problem. We have money coming in, we just have to get through this time. Hopefully Aidan will look back on this and say, "is that all there is to being broke?" We own our house (and we got money in the bank on time to not bounce our first mortgage payment!) and there's oil in the oil tank. When Aidan was born we were similarly broke but it was much worse because we had debt. My mom was staying with us and was buying all of our groceries and supplies. I didn't have a car for most of Aidan's first year. He LOVED putting on his shoes because he knew that we were actually going somewhere. I never answered the phone for the debt colletors. Yes, things are absolutely rosy right now in comparison. This will pass - and soon.