A Home for Luna ~ Our Little Moon

Luna is a fighter. Born six weeks early according to her original estimated due date, Luna has learned to breathe on her own, been healed of jaundice, and, thanks to mommy's milk, she has regained the weight she lost during her first week of life. After a little over two weeks of tube feeding, she's learned to feed from both the bottle and to nurse. She's still in gestational development, so, for now, she's growing and developing in the hospital.

The job her daddy had gotten fell through, because the person he was getting rides from is no longer employed there and without a steady ride, the job is inaccessible to him, since it is not served by public transportation. I love my job as a Dutch Brothers Broista, however, while Luna is still in the hospital and as long as she is considered to be medically fragile due to her preemie status, I will be on maternity leave. As great a place to work Dutch Brothers can be, it's still a part-time, minimum wage job that doesn't pay all the bills, as so many people in our country are aware from personal experience. While I'm on maternity leave, I am not getting paid. I do plan on returning to work as soon as it is safe for Luna to have me do so.

We were saving up to move into a house we would be sharing with others, however, that plan fell through. The money we had saved has gone toward taking care of ourselves while Luna is in the hospital. Now, while Luna is fighting her way out of the hospital, mommy and daddy are trying to find a way to provide a home for Luna to go to when she's released from the hospital, which could be as soon as Thursday, March 27th, three and a half weeks before her original due date of April 20th.

Social services, including housing services, are stretched to their limits in our area. The waiting lists for public housing and the Section 8 choice vouchers are often three to five years long or longer. Emergency services from some of the agencies will cover a week or two at a hotel. The shelters are full. Living wage jobs are difficult to find for undereducated, young workers and require an address to put on applications, clean clothing in good repair for interviews and for working in. These are things we have lost recently.

Help us to give Luna a stable home and a solid start to her new life, the kind of start and life that her father and I have never truly been able to have or experience. We realize that we are young and have made choices in our pasts which have been looked down on by members of this society we live in. However, we have taken ownership of our mistakes and have fought hard to become the people Luna deserves as her parents.

Having been raised in broken and dysfunctional homes in the war zone of poverty and modern society, we want to do something different and better for Luna, but, we cannot do it alone. We need your help to get started.

We want to raise Luna away from urban sprawl, out of the war zones of drugs, violence, and economic disparity which we grew up in. We want to teach her to live close to nature and how to be in harmony with the world and people around her. We want to invest our time and energy into learning for ourselves and teaching Luna how to grow our own food and to live cleanly and sustainably.

At this moment, we are looking for enough money to pay move in deposits, two to three months worth of rent, three months worth of bus passes for both of us, so her daddy to look for work and get to and from work, for us to get her to and from her medical appointments, and for me to be able to get to and from work once I am able to work again. If there is money left over from these expenses, it will go toward paying for utilities, purchasing basic personal and household necessities, and taking care of the day to day business of parenting.

$5,000 will enable us to get out of the city and into a more affordable and natural area. It will help us pay for the basic necessities to be able to start providing for ourselves. It will help us give Luna a healthy start. Any amount given will go directly toward providing a safe and stable home for Luna.