Thursday, May 29, 2014

Rough patch

Nothing new on the parenting front.  The girls are 98% awesome 2% challenge.   They're best friends and love playing together.   They're obsessed with Frozen and can recite portions of the dialog verbatim, complete with gestures and inflections copied directly from the movie.
That's not where our difficulty lies.  The kids are fantastic.

Financially, we're struggling.   C hasn't had a real paycheck since December and my 3 1/2 year old layoff has caught up with us.   We've fallen behind on the mortgage and have been preliminarily denied modification due to our current lack of income.   C has been working for a couple of months, but hasn't been paid.   Sob story about the new company needing to complete certain milestones before they get paid and have the money to pay employees. I wouldn't be heartbroken if we short sale the house.  We're so underwater that it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off.  My credit score has already plummeted,  and won't start to improve until we somehow catch up on the mortgage.   Luckily, everything is in my name,  so C's credit is great.

Even our financial woes pale in comparison with some family health issues.  My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer last July and it had spread before it was caught.   Now, tumors on his liver have not responded to treatment.   The doctors have given up and it seems my father has too.  We have weeks, maybe a month or two if we're lucky.   It's not looking good.   My siblings and I will meet with a hospice nurse tomorrow.   We don't know how to deal with this.   We don't know what to expect.   I have no idea how to tell the girls that their grandfather is dying.   How do I explain death to them?  How much time do we have left?