God Bless You Secret Santa!!!!

Wow!

OK, the last few months have been a financial disaster, they really have. And December has been the scariest month financially that I've experienced.

My sweet parents gave me money to buy Christmas presents, so that wasn't the problem. The problem was that in addition to paying my husband's expenses at his apartment AND all our household expenses, we had tons of other unexpected expenses. Aside from the huge grocery bill [cooking for the holidays is expensive...I never realized how much!], we had medical bill after medical bill - hundreds of dollars. [Two cases of pneumonia, five cases of RSV, one adult case of bronchitis, and then my bills for the kidney stone - CT scan copay, doctor bills, drugs, etc.] We have great health insurance, but just the copays for all the medical stuff and medications snowballed very quickly. And then of course I missed work because of the kidney stone, which also cost us several hundred dollars in income that we desperately needed.

So, Wednesday [the day after Christmas] I was looking around and trying to decide if I should call St. Vincent de Paul and get some grocery money. I have never seen my refrigerator so empty, and my "cupboard was bare". [Just call me Old Mother Hubbard! LOL!] Somehow I managed to overdraw my checking account [really smart, I know], so I have a negative balance in there right now. Other than some coins in a jar by my computer desk, we were completely tapped out.

I thought my husband was getting paid on Friday [today], but then realized I was wrong - no paycheck till Monday. I had enough food to barely scrape by until Today, but no way could I feed the kids till Monday on what I had around.

So I spent the whole day Wednesday going back and forth about what to do. I didn't WANT to call SVdP - I felt like there were other families MUCH worse off than we are and I didn't want to take money from them. And, amazingly, through this whole separation ordeal, I have not had to use any charity or government assistance, other than that one disasterous attempt to use WIC [which amounts to about $20 in groceries...not much at all]. Starting with this next paycheck, we SHOULD start to catch up pretty quickly - no more separate residences, no more split family income, etc. AND, I will be working quite a bit in January which will also really help.

But how to make it till Monday.....

Then we checked the mail, which we hadn't checked in a few days because we had been running around for the holidays. There were a lot of lovely Christmas cards in our box and as I was going through those enjoying the photos and Christmas letters, when I got to one that I opened and a gift card fell out. A $100 gift card! There was a very sweet note inside from "Secret Santa" .... I just burst into tears.

Wow!

So, the kids and I were able to go to Publix last night and buy enough food to get us through till Monday. It was really amazing!

So, Secret Santa, I have no idea if you are a blog reader or not, but if you are - THANK YOU!!! You made a HUGE difference for us. God Bless You and know that I will be praying for you!

God is so good. :)