Up and Down Day

The past week has been full of excitement around here as Skyler started preschool on Monday and Courtney started kindergarten on Wednesday. They have both now completed their first week of school and both are enjoying it.

Personally, I have had two times in the past week when I felt completely normal. One was one this week when I was just laying on the couch next to Traci and she had her arm across me. It was very comfortable and relaxing. The other time was when I woke up one morning, but I won't go into details about why I felt normal.

Today, however, was a different story. I had to fight off negative feelings in the morning. First, it was because I had to do bills since today was payday, and I knew we didn't have enough money to pay for everything (bills) that come out of this paycheck. (I wound up pulling the max amount of cash I could from our Chevron gas card and deposited it into our checking to pay bills. We are still about $2 short, but I have at least $125 extra coming from work so hopefully it will arrive before the gym automatic deduction hits on the 15th.) Secondly, because I went to the dentist and received a gingivitis treatment, which I didn't know was coming until they examined me, which means I just added over $100 to a dentist bill that is already over $600. Fortunately, they are working with us and letting us do $50 payments each month. I don't think we can even afford that, but somehow we'll make it work. (I won't even get into the fact that my sister and niece just flew into town and aren't coming our way to visit, so we have to trek out to Corona to see her. Oh, and her husband, my brother-in-law, was in the hospital this morning as a result of illness.)

After that, the day turned around dramatically, thank goodness. One of Traci's friends from MOPS said she was going to come by with some groceries. (Traci has let the MOPS leadership team know, in general, what is going on and has kept them up to date so they can pray for me and us.) She brought over quite a bit of food that will help us make it to next Friday when we are supposed to be getting $100 from the in-laws again. We need a few ingredients for some of the things, but not much really. Traci's friend also gave us a card with the food. When we opened it after she left, we saw that there was a $75 Safeway (Vons around here) gift card! What a blessing! We can now go get those extra ingredients and more! What an answer to prayer! That on top of what we have left on the Target gift card (about $38 of the original $100), given to us by another of Traci's friends from church, should hold us over for a little while, in terms of food.

So while today started off with frustration and in general not being good, it generally turned around pretty well in the afternoon. The Dodgers lost, but in the grand scheme of things, I can live with that. Let's hope tomorrow goes well as we spend the day in Corona (and 2-3 hours in the car). At least my parents, grandma, sister and niece will be there.