I didn’t have the heart to send this update out at the time. I started it several times, but never completed it because it seemed like such a defeat…
Julie qualified for pre-school in the Plano ISD. She went for 2 hours twice a week to help with speech therapy and socialization. They didn’t supply feeding therapy, but we had hoped to pick that up through Medicaid. Now it will have to wait.
Julie really enjoyed her time in pre-school. They helped her pronunciations and brought out some new, fun behaviors. She only attended for about two months before the school year ended.
Although she hasn’t had any feeding therapy, Julie retained her ability to drink through a straw, from a syringe and from an open cup. She made a little progress in feeding by tasting some new things that we hadn’t tried with her. She consumed no measurable amount of volume but she voluntarily continues to explore new tastes and textures.
Adam began standing and almost got to walking before we moved. He shares his big smile with everyone who meets his eyes. He started teething so everything he holds he places in his mouth.
I finished the semester strong. I co-taught a session in one of my Christian education classes in April and did very well. I also had a chance to teach my church group once or twice, too. The summer semester began with two on-line classes and a one-week on-campus class.
Sarah and I decided to not renew the lease on our apartment. We had no money, they gave us no month-to-month option, and utilities had been very expensive. Without a job, we faced the prospect of homelessness at the end of May.
My mother, who had refused to help us anymore in March, found herself in the hospital in April. Through a series of interesting situations, she eventually recanted, agreed to pay our bills and offered to let us live in her basement. Her decision came just in time when we ran out of money in mid-May.
Starting in April, one of our medical providers put us into collections for feeding supplies they shipped to us for Julie in the spring of 2013. I spent hours on the phone dozens of times trying to understand the nature of the problem (they disputed specific items on certain months while ignoring the same items on other months) and getting someone to look behind the information I possessed more deeply. After nearly three months, they admitted that the acceptable codes had changed during 2013, but the supplies in question carried the previously acceptable coding. I joked that after all of our debts and financial problems, we found ourselves in collections for something we didn’t owe. Amazing!
Somewhere along the line, Julie changed Medicaid providers and the same supplier didn’t get all the paperwork. They threatened to take away her feeding pump. Eventually, we got it straightened out, but I didn’t worry since they didn’t know our current address.
Medicaid dropped the ball on Julie’s feeding supplies during the change, so my Mother had to cough up several hundred dollars to pay for extra formula and pump bags while we waited for the paperwork to come through. We fretted for days wondering whether Julie’s supplies would arrive in time before she ran out. We added regular Pediasure to her specialized formula to make it last longer. It cost us a lot of time and expense to supply Julie her needs.
I got an interview for a $18/hour job in October. Since I had just started looking, I decided to pass on the offer and keep looking for something better. It took until the end of May before I got my second interview. I stepped out of my week-long class for the phone interview. Sarah and I spent a hectic Memorial Day weekend knowing that we must move, but wondering whether we would move to Missouri, or stay in Texas with a new job. On Wednesday, May 28th, we got word that I didn’t get the job, so we focused on moving out of town by Saturday the 31st.
In the meantime, I had rented a uHaul truck and a local storage shed. I worried that my shoulder wouldn’t support moving all the boxes, furniture and appliances. Fortunately, God helped me survive the move. Several friends from church and DTS also pitched in to move us on Saturday. After giving away nearly a hundred boxes of possessions, we had hoped to make the move easier. Incredible how things accumulate!
We stayed with my brother Peter for the weekend while Sarah and I continued cleaning and collecting debris. I turned in the keys on Monday to manager who raved about Sarah’s cleaning job and the wonderful condition of the carpets. Then, I waited until the trash man emptied the dumpster to haul our garbage to the dumpster and drove away.
We spent the week living in a cheap extended stay hotel while Julie finished school and the kids got in another round of doctors’ appointments. One of our friends graciously agreed to pay for our rent, so I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but, well… the place briskly inhaled. The toilet from the other room leaked into our kitchen area, so the floors and carpets were filthy. We needed to store Julie’s feeding supplies and dozens of other boxes in the tiny room with us to avoid the 100 degree heat outside. After spending more than an hour just getting the cars unloaded into the room through multiple entrance doors on rickety carts, Julie started to sob when she saw her place to sleep. We all sat on the filthy floor, exhausted and wept – homeless, broke and without hope – like the scene from Will Smith’s Happyness movie.
Our apartment people kept most of our deposit saying that they had to clean and replace parts of the carpets. Of course, we knew that they planned to renovate the apartment (including replacing all the flooring), but we decided to leave it to God to resolve in His way.
The highpoint of the week came on the next weekend when my niece remarried in a lovely ceremony in downtown Dallas. Sarah and I and the kids enjoyed ourselves, then got one more chance to visit our church friends on Sunday before loading a uHaul trailer and heading out to Saint Louis.
We ran into the strongest storm I have ever experienced at Joplin, Missouri just after sunset. The heavy rain obscured signs and the road to less than six feet. Only the constant lightning allowed us to maintain our bearings but I missed the exit ramp. We turned around and spent the night in the Joplin Holiday Inn. Again, it took me an hour to haul enough boxes and bags up to sustain us for the night since we got the room strategically placed furthest away from the parking lot.
My mother has lived in her house for over fifty years. During that time, she accumulated an uncounted amount of decorations, furniture, hobbies, trinkets, and just plain junk. After moving in what we carried in our two cars and a uHaul trailer, I had to organize enough room so that Sarah could clean and begin to make a home for herself and the children.
Mice had taken over the house in recent years, so we found their nests and droppings in every closet, drawer and cubby. Bumble bees had made a nest inside one of the walls. I killed dozens of large angry bees after sealing the holes to the outside. And then came the spiders and crickets!
Sarah grew to respect, admire and love our cat, Rachael, who stationed herself in our bedroom while the family slept. Her nightly vigil made these first weeks bearable.
In time, I setup my computer and continued working on my final two classes and the papers I owed for the one-week class in May. My professors showed me much grace to turn in assignments late until I caught up around the end of June.
We had moved from our own 3 bedroom, two story, two thousand square foot townhome with covered parking, a small backyard and a private courtyard through several phases to a dirty and cluttered basement. We gave away alot of things prior to the move. Most of our remaining possessions stayed in storage in Dallas. I had no job prospects. We had no money of our own. We felt very low.