Yeah, we're poor!

So today I went down to register Will for school. In our school district, you have to prove yourself below the poverty line in order to "qualify" for your child to attend pre-k. (On a side note, shouldn't 'qualify' signify you have reached a goal instead of non-reached it?)

I've been really concerned about this because Steve and I are always right above the cut off to qualify (there it is again) for any sort of government aid. We don't get food stamps, Will can't get into head start, and we can't even get the reduced rate insurance Texas offers for children. I don't know how we are suppose to pay for all those things with the excessive $200 or so a year we make, it must be my bad budgeting skills. (Just joking, we make at least $500 a year more than poverty level.)

Regardless, unless something happened, I knew we would not be qualifying. Oddly, the weirdest things happened last month. First, Steve's boss decided to build a deck of his neighbor, but didn't want to run the funds through the company. So he put Steve to work on it and paid him personally for the week and a half it took him to build the deck, during which time Steve didn't get paid through the company. Nothing like this have ever happened at this job before and there was no advance notice that it would.

Next, and this wasn't a good thing, but one of his friends father died and Steve missed a couple of days of work.

The financial requirements to qualify are that you either provide last years tax statement or the last month's pay stubs from your place of employment. Ding!

Even with nine missing paydays, we were less than $50 away from the highest amount we could make in a month to qualify. Weird hu? For once, the fickleness of fate was on our side. Yeah, we're poor!