Booked

Well, we have done it. Bit the bullet and paid the money. We have seats on a plane in May that will take us to New Mexico to visit Smug-Hub's family. We are beyond excited to show Mary the beauty of Albuquerque and show her off to the family members there whom haven't met her yet. I personally am excited for my Mother-in-Law's cooking!! Also, there is a restaurant there called Frontier and I would eat there every day that we are there if people would let me!! So, I will be planning not to be dairy-free or counting points while I'm there. I am going to enjoy all those foods while we are there and deal with the fallout later and I don't care!

We are booked on an evening flight out of Virginia, leaving at 5:55pm. We have two layovers and arrive in NM about midnight. My thinking is that Smug-Baby may sleep most of the way thus making the flight less stressful. If she does sleep the whole way and is wide awake when we arrive, I will go right to bed and Smug-Hub will stay up with her until she is ready for sleep. He generally stays up super late with his brothers anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem. If she stays awake for the flight, then she will be super beat when we arrive, so I will take her to bed with me right away. Win-win!! (Yeah, I know there is so much that could go wrong with this plan, but whatever).

We will leave on Sunday morning with one layover that puts us home at 4:30 in the afternoon. That should give us enough time to get home and fed and unpacked a bit before getting Smug-Baby (and her mama) in bed in order to start the new week. Again, I do know there is a lot that could mess up my perfect plan!

I love my husband's family so much! They are such good people and loving and kind and all the boys are decent and respectful and love their Mother. One of the brothers hasn't met Smug-Baby yet and I am looking forward to seeing their reaction to each other. It's been a long time since the others have seen her and she has changed so much!

One of the brothers is graduating from college and that is the big reason that we are going then in May and the tickets were ungodly expensive, but Smug-Hub's mom said she would send us some money to help out with the cost, so that’s good. I had these big plans for our tax money and spending over $1,000 on plane tickets wasn't one of them.

On that front, I have paid off one credit card and put $500 on each of the others, so we are well on our way to having all those paid off. I am going to throw as much as I can at the higher interest cards and only pay the minimums on the no interest ones until the others are paid off. Once everything is paid, we should have about $250 extra and I am thinking that I would like to start contributing to our IRA's and Money Market accounts again. I would also like to set some money aside for repairs to Smug-Hub's truck or to purchase a new one. His truck is wonderful but it is 15 years old and won't last forever. Our life only works because we have two cars, so we need wiggle room in the budget for repairs or even a car payment in the future.

I love feeling like we are coming out of the forest financially. We used so much of everything we had when I was home after Smug-Baby was born. We had to use money from our IRA's, everything we had in savings and charged a lot of the credit cards just to get by. When she was in the NICU we spent a lot of eating at the hospital and extra gas going back and forth not to mention the huge medical bills! Thankfully, I have all but one of those medical bills paid now and with the chunks being paid on the cards, we should soon be recovered and back into a saving mode rather than a spending mode.

Having a baby really isn't expensive overall. The day to day expenses haven’t really changed. Since we aren't using disposable diapers or wipes and are still nursing and not purchasing baby food there really isn't anything she needs. People have purchased enough clothes and toys for her that I haven't needed to buy much there either!

Anyway, all things are looking up on the financial front and we are looking forward to spending time with family in a few months!!