21 weeks

Baby Jelly Bean girl is one active little booger most days!  Every few hours I can feel her thumping around in there.  She's not keeping me awake at night yet, but maybe that's coming next.  I do have to turn over a lot in my sleep thanks to our worn-out mattress.  Alas, the odds of getting a new one are still pretty slim since we're still just barely living on my little paychecks.  We should be able to get food stamps this month once I get all the paperwork together, but energy assistance ran out so we owe the propane company.  If it's not one thing it's another.  Sigh.

B is still about the same.  He had a CT scan yesterday to look at the progress and the abcess is half the size it was when they started, and the doctors are happy with that, so we keep going with the drain.  It's frustrating for both of us because it will take another 4-6 weeks at least to get it cleared up so he still won't be able to work, but now they put a smaller tube in so he's in a lot less pain than he was.  The bigger tube was kinked and poking into the wall of his liver, pushing on a broken rib, and laying on a nerve that shot constant pain up into his bad shoulder... ow!  At least he's feeling better today so he can probably start helping a little more around the house, which he hasn't been able to do since they put the bigger tube in in the first place.  Every little bit helps. :)

I've been agonizing over whether to get another job or not.  I'm already stretched thin enough that I have meltdowns at least once a week (not helped at all by pregnancy hormones, but still) but part of that is money stress.  Getting more income into the house would help a little of that, but it's not like I have all kinds of free time right now anyway, between both of our doctor appointments, aid applications, baby shower stuff, starting to plan wedding, keeping us fed and the house in some sort of order, getting the bills paid, and keeping the hospitals happy with piles of paperwork.  I don't think I could physically work any more than I do already without letting half of that slip, and none of it can afford to be put off except for the wedding, which I haven't really worked on yet anyway.  I have this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that if I go to work full-time it will take care of a lot of our problems, but now I'm not so sure.  Monday afternoons are often full of appointments, both for me and B, and there's another month left of Symphony (which I WILL NOT give up, period), and I know at some point my appointments will get closer together.  That pretty much takes Mondays out of the running for being regular work days.  Then Tuesday I'm always running around like mad trying to get errands done that can only happen during business hours since that's my only day to do it.  How do people get anything done if they're at work all the time?  Maybe when Symphony's over I could wait tables or something on the weekends for a few months until Jelly Bean comes.  Hopefully B can go back to work around then and we can get our feet under us a little bit before I'm worthless.  I'm fairly sure I won't be able to handle going right back to work full-time after she comes either.  I know we can't afford to miss more than 2 of my paychecks so I know I won't get much time off, but it seems pointless to get a full-time job now when I'm pretty sure I won't want to work full-time with a newborn.  Switching jobs is stressful anyway, with new training and getting used to a new schedule and everything. 

I was very excited about an interview I had earlier this week but now I'm thinking it's not such a good idea.  They haven't called me back or anything yet so it may not be an issue anyway, but I had a strong feeling yesterday that I needed to decide what to do before they do call.  Every few months I have this same dilemma for some reason or another and I keep coming back to the fact that I need to be writing in my spare time.  My music will never get off the ground if I don't work on it, so it's time that I treated it like a job and put some real time into it so I can reduce my dependency on the struggling small businesses in this little town.  I'll never become my own person with my own career if I keep jumping from one little job to the next in the hopes that one of them will take me somewhere.