A bit of a rant

I am so sick and tired of turning the computer on every morning to hear about some other poor single parent complaining about how bad the credit crunch is affecting them. Sod them. What about us families with 2 parents and young children?

I’m sorry, this is probably going to piss off quite a few people but single parents are getting the best deal at the moment. The government pay for their houses and most of their bills and those who DO work have their childcare paid for and still manage to make ends meet.

I want to know what’s being done about the rest of us? People who’s partners DO work every single hour availiable to them only to be told that they’re not allowed to do more than 8 hours a day because the companies can’t afford the extra wages? The people who’s partners go off to work EVERY morning without fail, ill or not and then come home after their allowed 8 hours, only to come home to a meal of beans-on-toast and have to change their child’s bottom with only one nappy left in the packet and no money to buy any more until the wages come in.
I’m talking about all us families who skrimp and save, Paying rent, bills and then having to kit out the children who are enevitably going through a growth spurt, needing new shoes, new outfits and bigger nappies.

With the current climate, What are WE meant to do? We still have to pay the same amount of bills, rent and have to eat as well.

And then of course there’s the extras on top of that, for example, clerical errors meaning that more and more people having to pay back more and more debts which they have been forced into. And that of course only increases the amount of outgoings when the money isn’t there TO pay out.

Of course, this rant is mainly because I’m pissed off at the fact that yet again, the government is trying their damndest to screw us all out of our hard-earned money and making it increasingly difficult for anyone to survive and have a good quality of life.

This morning, Alan phoned the council to sort out the court summons which we received last week for non-payment of council tax.
Now of course, we HAVE been paying it, but for some unkown reason, they have only recieved 3 out of 6 payments. needless to say, I made the payments and I know for certain that we HAVE paid it all.
So alan phoned only to be told that we must pay back the £386 in the next 6 months by direct debit or face legal action.
This raises it’s own problem in the fact that I don’t like direct debits. Alan gets paid every 4 weeks and I will now have to leave the money in the bank for anywhere up to 3 extra weeks to pay for the error and pay back the money, just to avoid yet another black mark on our credit file.

Then of course there’s the credit card. Capital one have decided that they are going to send our statements out a month later than they should, If at all. This of course means that the payment date on the statement is a month BEFORE I recieve the statment and so in total, we have had about £100 worth of charges in the last 2-3 months for late payment fees, which then of course push you over your allotted limit, incurring yet ANOTHER fee, which is subject to a 5 day payment before a £35 late payment charge is lumped on.

I have tried to phone them, only to be hung up on 3 times within 10 minutes. So now I am refusing to pay them anything until they reverse and refund ALL charges incurred since we moved in in July. I should have only had about £35 out of my £200 limit spent on the card, but due to their error, I am now at least £70 OVER the limit.

Add to all of this the errors with the housing office and we have been royally screwed over. They have decided that the small amount of housing benefit which we were entitled to (which only JUST covered our shopping bill for a month) has been cut in half because THEY made an error when transferring our details onto the computer system. We told them Alan was paid every 4 weeks, yet they said monthly. We sent all the forms back online and checked them when they came back and everything was correct, yet somewhere, someone managed to tick the wrong box and now WE have to pay back a total of £300 which is now coming out of what we’re entitled to before we even recieve it.

Needless to say that now we are even more strapped for cash than ever before. We will end up paying £150 council tax for the next 6 months, £550 a month rent for a shabby little 2 bedroom flat with leaky windows, no insulation, a floor which is uneven and bends with every step and a tiny kitchen which now poses a risk to our always growing daughter who has discovered that she can not only open the fridge freezer, but also reach the hob.
If you add to that our £25 phone bill, which is non-negotiable, and the food bill.
We don’t eat terribly but manage to get by on £30 a week for food for the 3 of us. So why do we end up paying almost £60 a week on shopping? Nappies. With a newborn, you can get a box of nappies for £10 and in that box would be enough nappies for 2 weeks, roughly 80 nappies. So why is it that when your toddler needs a size 5, you pay £10 a box and only get 45-50 nappies? That’s not enough for a week if you, like most parents have a very active 17 month old toddler who’s drinking plenty, eating and growing almost constantly and getting through 6/7 nappy changes a day. If you add to that the cost of wipes as god forbid we should wash our child’s dirty bum in the limescale encrusted water which slowly drips from our taps on a daily basis, for that would make their skin sore and mean that we have to spend yet more money on over-priced skincare which barely even works!

So here’s the facts.
We need to move into a house. due to my undefined health condition, I can barely leave the house with a not-yet-walking-downstairs toddler and the bag filled with nappies and clothes changes which will inevitably be needed, even for just a 2 hour trip to the local baby group.
We can’t yet move into a house as we are unable to afford the deposit, and even if we could, we Can’t get a mortgage and estate agents always use a credit search to ensure rent can be paid before leasing a property, which means our only hopes lie with private or council.
Heres’ the kicker!
Private costs extra because people don’t pay agency fees but they always ask a higher rental price because they too need to provide for their family.
Council wise, We are NOT entitled to anything from them. Even when we had to move from bournemouth and had NOWHERE to stay, we were still not eligable for a council house or any sort of support from them due to the fact that alan was working!

needless to say that if Alan refused to work, or I was a single mother, (or an immigrant from poland) I’d be entitled to a 3 bedroom house, rent and council tax paid for and STILL have enough for food, holidays and a nice spangly car.
So what are we to do? Alan can’t work extra hours, we can’t physically make ANY more cutbacks as we are already making do with the bare minimum and now we’re having to make it stretch even further!

We also have a wedding to pay for , which I know we decided to do, but we’re fed up of waiting just for convenience sake.
after the wedding, we WERE going to try for a second baby, which is seeming more and more like a good idea, just for the extra money we’d be entitled to. of course, that’s not why we’d have another baby at all, we LOVE being parents and want to expand our family.

That said, with all that’s going on in the economic climate, what is the government doing to help us hard working families? absolutely nothing. The insist on putting up council tax, rather than lowering it, they increase tax on food, which means that we cannot afford to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, and then get accused of bad parenting for not giving our children their “5 a day”. The cost of milk and nappies is constantly going up, without the increase in wages or work hours to make up for the shortfall which most of us are now experiencing.

Then of course there’s the cost of childcare. I could go and get a part time job, but I’d actually be spending more on childcare than I would earn and would effectively be adding another bill to our already long-list.

And so I’m sat here, finishing off my daughters left overs from lunch, waiting for our shopping to be delivered while the other half is working his backside off for next to nothing, just so that we can pay the government workers to go on their fancy holidays and buy their posh cruise ships and their 6 cars. All while us “lower class” families struggle to provide the basics. We’ve already had to get rid of the car, just to save on extra bills and tax payments, and along with it our freedom. It means that we’re all a lot fitter due to all the walking we’re now having to do, but why should we have to be forced into making descisions like this? why should we have to sacrifice our little comforts? Because the government are too busy giving 3 bedroom houses to school drop outs and teenage mothers who are too poorly educated to know how to not have kids. They’re too busy paying money to people who claim that they’re “too fat to work”
It’s all just laziness and ignorance and we’re having to pay for it!

ok, rant over.
god I need a holiday XD

 

speculation

I wonder.. can we really trust these modern hpts? They say that they can detect pregnancy from 4 days before your period, but I wonder if that is really a good thing.

Last tuesday, I did one of these hpts and the result was positive, so we got all hyped up and excited over the thought of having a new baby, but then on saturday it all went horribly wrong. The drs couldn’t explain it properly, so I was left wondering what had happened.

I had had a miscarrage only 5 days after finding out I was expecting again. The doctors had told me that If I had tested a day later, I wouldn’t have known that I was pregnant, so inother words, I wasn’t pregnant at all according to the doctors at the hospital.

Now my point is, How big of a difference must there be in hormone levels for the tests to detect them? I don’t think that there would be that big a change within 24 hours. If this was the case, then why would the doctors have told me that I would have gotten a negative 24 hours later? I just wish that they would have explained it to me properly as it might have helped me make sense of it all.

I suppose it makes it even worse that they said I was only one week at most and probably just tested too close to conception, which to me makes no sense. If, as they said, it happens all the time but most women don’t know that they were pregnant, why then did I get 2 positive results and have morning sickness for a week before the mc? If I was only a week preg then my body wouldn’t have had time to register it. It just makes me mad.

Don’t get me wrong, I know that it just wasn’t meant to be and that I simply rejected the non-baby due to a likely genetic fault determined at conception, but still, in that situation, doctors should offer up a better answer. The way the doctors handled me in the hospital was nothing short of abysmal. When I got there, tears streaming down my face, I explained to them that I wasn’t registered with a midwife, they said that they usually didn’t “treat people off the street” as they weren’t a walk-in clinic or an A&E.

I was then just left in the waiting room and told someone would come and see me, and then it took bloody ages for someone to even check in on me and see how i was. I was then kicked out of the waiting room because Naomi was upset and couldn’t calm down, so rather than just putting me in a spare room, they made me pick her up and carry her out of the ward and into the main waiting area. to me, someone who is possibly having a miscarriage shouldn’t be made to pick up a toddler, as well as a nappy bag and all the coats and walk through the hospital to the main waiting area. I then got called into the examination room, and they didn’t explain what the reults meant, I had to ask them and even then they were rather vague

soon as they had finished their tests and told me I had miscarried our non-baby, they left and guided me out the ward. They didn’t even talk to me about it and pretty much left me to walk out, sit in the waiting room for an hour crying while waiting for mil to come and pick me up, and then just leave. they were so rude, I could have screamed bloody murder and they would have still left me there.

I want that baby so much right now. I really wish that I were still pregnant. It hurts so much to think that this time last week I was looking at double buggies and maternity clothes, planning on buying a bigger car and a new travel cot.

I’ve also just been put on the injection, and maybe after the wedding we can think again about trying for another one.
I was hoping that there was someone who was actually happy for us. All I’ve been hearing is that we can not afford another baby and that I’m too exhausted from Naomi so how am I going to manage a second? I just wish that for once people would see that it is what I really want and put aside their doubts and worries and just be happy.

Least I have the wedding to look forward to. We have a confirmed date now, 27th June! not long left now so Alan better get off his ass and start making some serious plans for finding a suit. Until he knows what he’s wearing, I can’t plan the buttonholes which is pissing me off!! aghhh I just want it all sorted out already. I hate last minute planning……

Well Sorry I’ve rambled a bit, Will be back in a few days!

Toodles!