A Mixed Bag Life Update
There’s been a lot happening over the past few weeks, hence the lack of updates on the blog. The biggest of these is my wife spending 5 days in the hospital after two emergency room visits for a Lupus flare. After a visit to her primary care doctor, she was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia and sepsis.
Obviously, this puts a lot of pressure on me, as I was effectively a single parent for a week. If anyone thinks
I was visiting Erin twice a day, spending about 2 hours with her per day, once in the morning after dropping the kids off at school, a task that takes nearly an hour as USD259 have elected to send my son to a High School that is 15-25 minutes away depending on traffic. And I dragged the kids to see Erin after school, much to my son, Conner’s chagrin, heaven forbid that he loses some Big Bang Theory watching time. Luckily, I have a job where my time is very flexible, allowing me to take the time to visit my wife.
Erin took almost another week to recover at home, feeling good enough to return to work on Friday and attend a real estate meeting on Wednesday. For the most part, she is feeling almost like herself again, which is not good, her Lupus and Fibromyalgia diagnosis means her quality of life is limited, at best.
Now, we have to look forward to the hospital bill, my wife has decent medical insurance, but I’m still expecting a bill in excess of $2,000. People in countries, like my home country of the UK, where socialized medicine is a reality, don’t know how good they have it, visiting the doctor is never a financial concern.
Moving onto our next topic, my aforementioned son, Conner, who we are having a hard time getting him motivated to put in some extra effort to get his grades up to where they need to be. He currently has one D and one F, both because he refused to hand in assignments, giving up, instead of putting in the additional effort needed to get the grades we know he is capable of. We try to talk to him, but he just stands there with a smirk on his face, like he doesn’t care, preferring to lounge about in bed watching TV.
We have bought him a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, which we have made clear that unless his grades improve to all C’s or above, he will not be allowed to have it until his grades improve. In previous years, we have allowed him to play games on birthdays and Christmas, but not this year, if he is not willing to put in the effort, i.e ‘give’, then we are not going to allow him to ‘take’, allowing him to play games.
I expect a battle with my mother-in-law over this decision, she often goes against our wishes when the kids stay overnight with her, our daughter, Alya rats her out every time. But, enough is enough, Conner needs to learn the concept of
He has not played a video game in months because of his poor grades. In middle school, his grades were reset every semester, but high school is different, grades are not reset, everything from now on is working towards his high school diploma. We explained to him about this reality, before high school started, but he chose to ignore our words of advice, being convinced that we were wrong, claiming that one of his teachers told him grades would be reset at the end of the first semester, now he realizes that was wrong.
Finally, we loaned a ‘friend’, $180, with the promise, we would be paid back on the 29th of November, which, we allowed to be pushed back to the 6th of December, and now this friend, says she cannot pay us back until the 13th of December, leaving us in a financial pickle, not being able to pay our own debts.
We took the same friend on vacation with us to NW Arkansas during the summer, and she paid nothing towards the mini-vacation, she even claimed to my wife that she paid for certain attractions for all of us, which is a lie, as she only paid for herself, not my family like she claimed, I know this as I was stood right behind her when she purchased her ticket. She paid nothing towards the hotel, we had already paid for a ticket for a 30 Seconds to Mars concert, which was the main purpose of the trip to Rogers, Arkansas.
Suffice to say, this ‘friend’ has burnt their bridges with me.