It's about time!

On Wednesday morning, I checked our bank account and cried. It was already at $0.00 and we don't get paid again until the 26th. It's been this way for a couple of months. Ever since we bought the house we've really been struggling to make our paychecks stretch. I've been questioning our decision to buy the house lately. It felt so right at the time, and everything just fell into place so I thought it was the right thing to do. But for a long time I've been feeling uncertain about it. Why would we be blessed with a house if we couldn't afford to pay the bills? When we decided to look for a house I looked over our budget, and I really thought we would be okay. But things just kept happening, and to make a long story short--we're in way more debt than we want and have barely enough money to eat.

On Friday morning I checked our account and cried again. This time they were tears of joy. Our tax return came!!! We have been waiting for this for 7 weeks. Since we bought the house last year, we had to mail in proof that we bought it which meant sending in a paper return and those take WAY longer to process. I wasn't expecting it until the middle of April, so the fact that it came so soon was an answer to many many prayers. We are so excited to finally pay off our car, pay off a big chunk of our credit card, and to have money in savings again. And- we'll be able to go to San Diego with the family next week, a trip I thought we weren't going to be able to take! A burden has been lifted and we are so grateful. Although it doesn't entirely fix our problems, it gives us a huge boost in the right direction!

Money problems aside, we promised that a little of the money would go to ourselves. We decided to FINALLY get a new couch. We've had the same couch for almost six years now. Although it's comfy, it's ugly. It's old. I think it's the first couch my in-laws got when they were married. We bought a cover for it a year ago, which masks it a bit, but Kate really likes to pull it off any chance she can get! A new couch was always on our "someday" list, and now we can finally cross something off. So here it is, the first brand new thing we've ever purchased:


We went to Mor furniture. It was the grand opening for the store, so they already had some pretty good deals going. They gave us an even better deal because we were able to pay it in full, and they threw in free delivery as well. Which, is really nice because we live out in Egypt. The cheapo in me wanted to shop around to make sure we were really getting the best deal, but Dustin was like "I want this one, it's a good deal and we deserve it". So I agreed and we bought it. It won't be here for a couple of weeks since it wasn't in stock, but we are sooooooo excited!