Pots O' Copper

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! I thought this would be a good story to share today.

Clay and I had very humble beginnings. Very humble. When I was pregnant with our second child we had no insurance and didn't quite meet the poverty level that we were at when we had our first child with no insurance and were forced to seek government aid. So, our second child was paid for by cash on a monthly basis and I did everything I could to lower the cost of the prenatal appointments and birth. I even went so far as to refuse pain drugs of any sort and brought many of the supplies I knew the hospital would charge us for (pads, those weird mesh underwear, ibuprophen, etc). I was so happy after five years when we could finally call our little guy "paid for". During that pregnancy we prayed our way through every pay check. One day the cupboard was bare and there wasn't enough money in our checking account to pay for groceries and hope we would get paid before the check cleared. The mason jar we had been throwing our pennies in for the past couple years gleamed like a pot of gold on top of the refridgerator. I went to the bank with my toddler in tow and asked if they could count the coins for me to give me cash. I tried to make it seem like the money belonged to my child and she was going to use the money for something "special". I was just too proud to admit that I was going to use the $17.00 to buy the next weeks groceries. I was so happy to get nearly twenty dollars, I was able to buy the basic necessities to get us to payday. We ate a lot of pasta dishes and tuna back then. Thank God for those days, I am definitely a better woman because of them.