Christmas Recap

The holidays around here were lovely.  We spent a few days visiting with various family members, had a number of close friends from all over to our house for a party on Saturday, and are now beginning to fall back into the daily routine.  I still have a week before classes resume, which is lucky since I have apparently chosen the holiday break as the ideal time to come down with the cold/flu/transient 24 hour bug that has been going around.  I've been feeling a bit like I got hit by a Mack truck, and therefore don't have a whole bunch to write about aside from what it's like to lie around like a bum with a box of tissues at hand.  

Other than all that, there has been one thing of note that warrants writing down.  With another couple of weeks before my loans arrive and last semester's loans dwindling, we've been truly cutting things extremely tight financially over the past month.  Add in the extra expenses of Christmas shopping and things had gotten a little scary.  I was fully expecting to have to pay the early January bills with credit cards and pay off the cards when the loan money arrived, and that whole idea was more than a little stressful, since we're used to budgeting everything so precisely.  I had been worrying about how we would manage for most of December, but finally realized that it wasn't going to do me any good and decided to try giving the whole situation up to my higher power.  I'm still not very good at the letting go thing, but since I've been working on it with D I figured it certainly couldn't hurt to try it with the finances, too.  And so I all but forgot about the money, figuring if it came down to credit cards that at least we would be able to pay them off fairly quickly.   

When D's last paycheck arrived the day after Christmas, it was a bit more than usual, and so we breathed a little bit easier.  Then, he won a contest for sales at work and got an extra bonus for doing so.  Yesterday, I received a completely unexpected check in the mail as a refund from our insurance company, stating that we'd overpaid.  All of these things combined have officially crossed the bank accounts into the black and given us enough money to pay for all of our expenses over the next few weeks.  Honestly, I hadn't really thought about it much until today, when I received and banked that extra insurance check, but clearly, someone somewhere is watching out for us a little bit this week, and I am so, so grateful.  It gives me hope that letting go might actually help in a lot more ways as well.