It's been a few years since I have shopped on black Friday but I thought this year I would give it a try. Our local Air Force Exchange had a mini-netbook for $199 I was hoping to get for my husband. I left the house at 3:30 to get in line for the 4am opening. News radio was on in the car when I started it and the Dave Ramsey show was playing. It got me thinking about spending for the holidays. When I finally got to the front of the line at the exchange they were of course sold out of the netbooks so I just started to look around. I ended up leaving with nothing. I didn't think it was worth standing in line for 20 mins for a few things I didn't really need in the first place. I went to Target and Toy's R Us next and again walked out with nothing. It was really a waste of time. After listening to the show on the radio and really thinking about what I wanted to buy there was nothing I really felt the need to spend money on. I did get a few things a Michaels. Most of it was stuff I needed for school for Taylor. I homeschool our oldest daughter.

We made it through the first holiday month and didn't put anything on the credit cards. One of our student loans has gone into repayment because my husband has dropped below half time. With this comes a monthly payment of $178 and capitalized interest in the amount of $444. I can't wait until they are gone. So even though we paid close to $2000 towards our debt, with accumulated interest we only paid down our debt by $1323 bringing the total to $97480. I stared work this month and after a week of working received a email that there was a four week waiting period from when my contract was requested until it would be put into effect so I won't get paid for any work completed this month. December 19th it becomes active for 90 days before I have to put a request for a renewal. This could be a blessing in disguise though. I have two weeks left of school and am feeling a little stressed with the amount of work I still need to do for it. This will give me time to finish that and get ready for the holidays. We leave to visit family on the 12th-20th and then my in-laws fly in on the 21st-Jan 5th to visit. It's going to be a long month. My husband and I have decided not to do gifts for each other this year and the kids each get two gifts from us. In the spirit of giving, our girls each put together a box for operation Christmas child and we donated gifts from each of the girls to the special needs ministry at our church. Next year my hope is to adopt a local family and provide Christmas for them. Someone did this for my family a few years when I was younger and it made such an impact on me and my family I would love to do it for someone else.

It's more of an internship at the local family support center but there is a third party group that I have a military spouse fellowship with that is willing to put me under a 90 day contract and pay me during my internship there. I'll be an independent contractor but at least I should make a little extra at $30/hr. It's only for 15 hours a week but, I'll take it! I'm not ready to do much more then that with the kids still at home. I'm hoping to push it closer to 20 hours a week but I'll have to see what my official contract says. YAY!