This last month - month & a half has been a roller coaster.



We'd heard some scurrying in our attic, had a couple places come quote us on prices to remove mice, and found out it was not mice. It was bats. Mice... you can kill and it's easy & relatively cheap. Bats... you can't kill & their poop is toxic, so it costs a lot to get rid of them.

Then, Russ's brakes went out... on his old car that isn't worth the $800 it takes to fix it, but we fixed it because $800 is less than it would cost to find a suitable replacement car.

This was also the month where my unpaid maternity leave paycheck arrived...  Two weeks of unpaid time sure seems short when you take it, but long when it's 10/194 of your pay.

But, we were blessed. Some unexpected money came our way through a variety of circumstances: a blessing, selling random stuff on our community swap page & ebay, and sales from my Etsy store.

I got a new job. Still within our district, but at a middle school. I had to tell my fifth grade teammates that I wouldn't be teaching with them next year, pack up and sort out seven years of elementary classroom teaching stuff, and move it to a classroom that doesn't exist yet.