"I'm Fine, and You?"

Yep, it's another pity party with Gem. And it's not even that time of the month!!!

I am so tired. Tired of faking a smile, tired of saying "fine" when asked howzit going, tired of trying to muster up the energy to feel and connect with the worship music we're singing at church. Have you noticed I haven't blogged anything about Christmas yet? Some of that is because we really try to start the Christmas season AFTER Miss M's birthday so they don't all get rolled together. The other reason is that I'm in denial. As it stands right now, we probably won't have much of a Christmas. We're so broke, we weren't able to give Miss M a party or a gift. We went to the ice cream store with a little bit of Hubby's gas money -- which she proclaimed better than our Red Robin tradition! -- but other than that, nada. I was going to try to bake her a cake, but used most of the flour to make bread to try to last til next Thursday (payday). Even then, our bills will get paid and that's about it. We are beyond scrounging the pantry. I have really worked hard to stretch our grocery dollars, and have done a pretty good job of it thanks to Hillbilly Housewife, but you can only stretch them so far. We have Christmas at my SIL's on Saturday and I don't have gifts for her kids yet. Not sure if I will. Sure don't have gifts for my kids yet. But we don't want to go as the poor relation. I haven't blogged much about it, as I didn't want to embarass Hubby or let on too much to the family. But I don't think they're reading much anyway so I just thought I'd unload. Hubby isn't the Worship Minister anymore, but still has a position at the church, I can't just share with anyone there. You want to be open with your church family, but who wants to see you walking around with your guts hanging out? I don't know. It's just stressing me out, I'm not nice to the kids, and I know I'm dragging their holiday down. I want to do the stoic "We'll just have an old-fashioned Christmas, it will be simple and nice", but I don't know if we'll even have that.

I guess it all started when Hubster stepped down as Worship Minister. They kept him on as a kind of music director, but cut his hours (and pay) by two thirds. For some stupid reason, we didnt' stop right then and do an item-by-item analysis of what that would do to our budget. We seemed to be making the bills. Things always got tight around the 15th and the 30th, but we made it. What we didn't notice was that we were whittling away at our meager savings. When it was gone, we sold the Marquis that Hubby had been driving, since my Sis had left her car her for him to drive when she moved to Maryland for a (car-provided) nanny job. That lasted a little while, but we paid off some debt to get our monthly bills down and bought Home Depot scrip to work on the basement and it was quickly gone. So now we're realizing that we have a LOT more month than we do paycheck. So we're praying. Hard. Our preacher's wife told me today "God will provide". Will he? When it was our own foolishness that got us into this?

We don't want God to drop a check in our laps (although we'd cash it if He did!), but just some guidance as to how we can fix this His way. What is His plan? I know there are times when we try to fix things our selves and just get in God's way for what He has planned for us, but I also know there are times where He gave us a brain and expects us to use it. How do we know the difference? I will say this, in the last two days, the cleaning job at the church has opened up and a friend asked me to babysit her daughter the week between Christmas and New Year. He is throwing a few things in our laps. We just have to be patient, I guess. I'm just running out of patience and fake smiles.