God's Economy

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! We truly have a lot to be thankful for. We live a blessed life and it is good to take time to reflect on that. I am especially thankful for my families health, as we seem to be having a lot of serious things hit very close to home lately. Today, some friends miraculously dodged a cancer bullet with their one year old granddaughter.

Another thing I wanted to make note of, is how thankful I am for God's provision for our family and the little blessings He has shown me this week. No mountains were moved, but I still know they were of God and think it's just as fun to watch how He is in the details of life.

On Tuesday, the girls and I were heading home from some errands and I was having an internal debate about whether to take the girls to McDonald's for lunch or fix something at home. I try to be conscious about how much money we spend on simple things like this, as they can eat away your finances quickly if you aren't careful. But, on this day, I decided to splurge. We skipped our annual trip to Great Wolf Lodge and I promised one disappointed five year old that this week would still be fun-filled.

So, we went through the drive-thru to get some food to go. I was analyzing the menu to see how much it was going to cost me to be the 'fun-mom' and buy happy meals vs. ordering from the value menu. I had to look several times and finally asked the clerk if the menu was right, because it said happy meals were $1.19!! She had me read it to her a couple times and assured me it was not right and told me the right prices. She never offered them at a discount, but I ordered them anyway. After giving me the total for all of our meals, she told me one of the happy meals was free, for catching the pricing error.

For Wednesday, we had plans to go to the pool and I had invited the neighbor to go. I had not informed her mom that it cost $4.75 for her daughter to get in, because I had not decided, yet, if I was going to pay her way or not. When I returned home from BSF, Crissa had left me a message stating that if we showed up a 6 pm, instead of a little earlier, we would get the family rate at the pool. With the discount, the price for all of us was almost the same amount I had planned to pay for the three of us.

Tonight, I browsed the Meijer ad for their Thanksgiving deals and spied a fishing pole that Regan had asked for as a Christmas gift. There were a couple of other things that made it worth a quick afternoon trip to the store. One of the deals was all shoes, buy one get one for a $1. I found three pairs for Regan for next year, a couple pair of fun fuzzy crocs for gifts for the girls and a pair of boots for Regan. Full retail was about $124. With sales and a discount card I have, I planned to pay about $37....in the end, some unexpected sale prices brought my grand total down to less than $23, for six pairs of shoes.

In God's economy, one plus one doesn't always equal two.