the tv miracle

Dec 26, 2014

Back in mid-November, on a day my body was doing really well, Kat and I went to Costco. She started looking for Christmas presents and I had a “What the heck, is it almost Christmas??” moment. I had not even started thinking about Christmas and simply could not imagine going shopping for presents, even though at that time I was doing quite well physically. The thought of being out in weather, standing in lines, going shopping alone, and even just wrapping my brain around anything Christmas-y was too much. Surely it was only September and I had months to get ready for Christmas?

I said, “I wish I could just buy them a TV and be done with it.” Kat jumped right on that idea and said she thought it was a great idea. Later I presented it to Richard in a kind of snarky-listen-to-this-crazy-idea way. He loved it and actually was able to convince me it was a great idea and not a you-are-a-lazy-bum-who-doesn’t-want-to-shop idea.

Then we presented it to the kids. Blythe and Keziah were all for it. Fisher and Annes, not so much. I assured them they would have at least two presents to open, one from each set of grandparents, and after about a week of thinking about it, they decided to go for it.

So, with everyone in favor I decided to start pricing out TVs and decided we actually wouldn’t be able to do it. Our gas bill to go home for Thanksgiving was more than I thought it would be and Richard’s check was about $500 less than I was expecting. I didn’t know what to do. Everyone was so excited about the idea of an actual working television we could watch movies on and now I didn’t know if I could make it happen. I found a great cyber Monday deal at Sam’s for a huge 48″ off-brand TV with a Roku stick included for $348. I thought it was a great price and really wanted to make it happen, but I still didn’t have enough pennies for it.

I like to hoard gift cards, it gives me a sense of security to have a way to purchase needed items when we have run out of cash, so I started searching through our gift cards from last Christmas and was able to come up with $60 in unused cards. While I was searching for gift cards, I found a sealed envelope with Keziah’s writing on it. I had no idea what it was, but it had a note on it, “$$$$ I owe you.”

WHAT???????? What money did she owe us? And why was it in the bottom of my bill bin? And how much was it?

It turned out to be $300. The total for the TV with tax was $368. So, with Keziah’s money and the gift cards, I had to come up $8.00. Eight whole bucks. Oh, my goodness. I sat on my bed and cried. I knew this was a gift from an all-knowing Father. If I had known about Keziah’s money earlier in the year, I would have used it when our Suburban broke down. But instead, it was kept hidden from me until the moment we needed it.

We are having so much fun having family movie nights with this TV! I have been pretty anti-TV our whole married life, but we do enjoy watching great family films together. We are learning all about Amazon Instant Videos and I’m pretty amazed at how far technology has come in the past few years – the Roku stick makes it so slick to access content from the internet. Our children finally feel like they are part of the modern world, teehee!