Free The Solomon Sisters Wise Up by Melissa Senate

pajamas, and various little shirts and pants.
    Monitor: $20. Hear baby’s every peep or lack thereof. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
    Rocking Chair: $100. Sounded nice enough.
    Bouncy Seat: $30. Buy one of these baby chairs with a vibrating feature and soothe a fussy baby.
    Changing Table: $100, plus pad: $20. Apparently, you could turn a dresser top into a changing area if you laid a curved, waterproof pad on top of it to change baby on.
    Nursing Pillow: $25. Looked a bit like a life-preserver cut in half around your waist.
    BabyBjörn: $89. The premier baby carrier. Wear baby against your chest and he’ll feel safe and secure and your arms will be free!
    Diaper Genie: $20. Just drop the soiled diaper in the top, turn the little lever, and voilà, no odor!
    Crib Bedding: $100-$300. Expensive sheets, I understood all too well.
    Burp Cloths: $20. Buy at least twelve of these for baby spit-up alone.
    Pacifiers: $5-$10. All babies like to suck, the writer said, but some people worry that using one at all means baby will demand his binky until second grade. Apparently, there were many “controversial” issues involved in the raising of infants. Be prepared for relatives, friends, even total strangers, to offer their opinions on this and many, many other aspects of baby rearing.
    About to throw up (from fear and not from morning sickness, which had yet to plague me), I opened my pregnancy journal, a gift from Sabrina, and jotted down some sorry facts:
    My income: $31, 500 per anum.
    My monthly expenses:
    Rent: $812.
    Gas & electric: $30 (in summer, $60).
    Phone: $30.
    Cable: $35.
    Subway: $45.
    Coffee and lunch: $200.
    Groceries: $50.
    Laundry: $30.
    Visa: $50 to $60.
    Student Loan: $115.
    Grand Total: Frightening.
    And I lived with a roommate. Once I got my own place, I’d have to double rent and utilities.
    My Net Worth: $0.
    Which meant my choices were:
    A) Win the lottery.
    B) Rob a bank.
    C) Ask my father for help.
    D) Get promoted to senior editor, which came with a $10,000 raise in salary (because senior editors were considered management, despite having no one to manage except an occasional editorial intern).
    E) Pray that Griffen didn’t mysteriously disappear.
    Choice A was impossible, since I couldn’t afford lottery tickets and had never been a particularly lucky person, anyway. I couldn’t do B, since the experience of my mother finding out I swiped a Bazooka bubble gum from the bodega on our corner and making me return it and apologize and sweep the floor for four Saturday afternoons turned me away from a life of crime forever. Forget C. You might think that as the daughter of a major movie producer who made sick money, there might be a generous wad of cash in my birthday card every year, but there never was a birthday card. “I’m not good at birthdays or holidays, pumpkin, you know that. Here, here’s a fifty. Go buy yourself something nice.” Which was accompanied by a pat on the head and a run-along-now look.
    Every year for the past eleven years, since my mother’s death from a sudden and senseless brain aneurysm, Ally had bought me something for my birthday that she thought my mother would have given me that year had she been alive. The card always said, I think Mom would have liked to see you in this, and it would be something I desperately needed but would never think to buy myself, like a raincoat. Despite how bossy and pushy and overbearing Ally was, she was all I had. Which was basically the reason why I wouldn’t ask her for financial help. She’d give it to me, because she had it to give and because I was her sister. I was pretty sure that Ally would do just about anything for me.
    D, the promotion, was the answer. E was a toss-up that I couldn’t depend on, so it was up to me. I couldn’t imagine Griffen ducking out on his financial responsibility to the baby, but he wasn’t exactly making a fortune himself, either. So even if Griffen did magically propose marriage, we’d still come up short