I am my blog.

Most of my posts on here relate to parenting or my personal struggles as a stay-at-home mom. I try to keep things light for the most part & really only delve into the heavier stuff when I feel I have to. I'm going to stop this. I need to be as real on here as I am in real life (that is the point, anyways) and I'm very honest about what happens in my life to the people in my life. If you read this, technically, you are a person in my life & you deserve the same honesty as everyone else.

This inability to really be honest is the main reason I haven't been blogging lately; I didn't really want to share all the turmoil and drama I was going through. I realize though, my blog is really a release for me. Yes, people read it. Yes, some of them are total strangers but it's still for me. No one else. I don't blog because people read what I write; people read what I write because I blogged it. They know that what they are reading is truth, it's my feelings, my experiences, my fears and goals.

One of the things I've avoided blogging about is our money trouble. When people hear you own a business, they assume you are rich from said business. WRONG. You actually need money to start a business; it is very expensive and often, you find yourself supporting your household AND your business on the profits from your business (like we are). If that's the case, things that run the household soon take a backseat to things that run the business because if there's no business, there's no house. Instead of paying utilities or rent, you have to buy supplies & gas to get to work to make the money to pay the utilities and rent.

Since the business is doing well & we're three-quarters of the way through our First Year, we feel confident the money coming in will keep coming in. It's just not enough to support us. What do we do? I like to think we're doing the smart thing; we're downgrading. Honestly, we don't need the third bedroom or the family room & paying $1200 a month in rent just isn't possible but with two little kids, an apartment seems more like jail cell to me. So I got brave. And responsible I guess. I called our property management and told them we need out, was there any way they had a place we could get into or could we get rent here lowered...surprise, surprise -- they have two-story townhouses not too far from where we are now.

Now, I started this post on the premise that I'm letting all the walls down; no prettying things up for you. If we didn't need to do this, I would never, ever move into a place like this. We drove by last night, after looking at the pictures and getting (uselessly) hopeful. The screams of unsupervised, ragged children hoodrats greeted us and my little bubble of hope burst. What did I expect? I don't know. The pictures looked so nice...but for $350 less a month, we get two bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, two 'balconies', a small fenced patio and covered parking. The goal is to stay here a year, fix our credit & pay off our debts, save some money (lots of money) and move out; hopefully, we'll be able to buy a house when the year's over -- hopefully.

I'm still waiting to get approval from management; I'm hopeful because frankly, I have to be; if we had other options, this would be a wholly different post (if a post at all). I'll be sure to update when we do find out, in the mean time send us all the good energy you can. We need it!