Hello all,

Some of you know our story, some of you don’t. We are a young family who work our butts off to make an okay life for our boys right now. We are reaching out to our tribe so maybe we can breathe a little easier.

Well, 4 years ago I decided to uproot my life and move to live with the love of my life with Hunter in tow. We became a military family and then decided to add Mave to our life, and since then, life has thrown everything at us.

First, after having Mave, I had to step back from my teaching career. Having him put me into massive postpartum depression, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to fill the shoes of a classroom teacher, so I decided to step into the role of special education paraprofessional so I could still work with kids while also taking my mental health seriously for my boys. Doing this took a huge financial toll as my income was then cut in half. I love working with children with unique needs, but it’s not a career when your family is struggling financially.

I’ve been trying to get back into my teaching career, but within our district, they are cutting the number of schools we have, so staff members are being moved around. This has made it almost impossible for me to find a teaching job as they have all gone with “someone with more experience” even though I have worked with the students who need more help than they receive from general education.

I then moved to another school when I started working with our highest-need students. I currently work with our life and Autism students. Most of my students are non-verbal, and they have taught me so much about my life and who I want to be as a person. Even though this job has its perks, it’s financially very hard on us.

Through the last 4 years, I’ve been making bottom-of-the-barrel pay to do the things I love while still trying to keep up on daycare and try and get a teaching job. Finding said job has been almost impossible as I don’t have “experience” as a full teacher.

We’ve been through a deployment, many job changes to try and make a better income. Dad has worked nights, weekends, overtime, you name it. I have 2 side hustles trying to help with bills. I’ve worked other jobs for the summers while balancing kids' needs, but we just can’t catch up.

Daycare is more than 50% of what I make in a month!!! MORE THAN 50%.

We don’t qualify for ANY assistance because as a household we make too much but yet live paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes that’s not enough. We don’t have any family here to help watch our kids, so we don’t have to pay for daycare; it’s just us scraping by. 

We are just trying to catch up so we can breathe a bit more!