Surprises and Blessings

A few weeks ago my husband was working hard on this huge project at work. The company was completely changing financial systems and it was a very long and involved process. Crunch time came and my hubby was working. all. the. time. He left early in the morning before the kids and I got up and he came home late after the kids were in bed. Some nights it was so late I was already in bed! It was a sad and very long week and a half. One day he worked 30 plus hours straight. I had to bring him a change of clothes after he worked all night and he was thankful his building has a small gym on the first floor with showers so he could freshen up. I hated that he had to work so much simply because we didn't get to see him. But I'm glad he has a job and so I tried not to complain.

One thing that made us chuckle is that my husband is salaried. There is never any overtime pay. And during a week where he put in 40 hours of overtime it did kinda make us wish he could earn some extra money! All I wanted was for some sort of praise/acknowledgement from his bosses of all of his effort, going above and beyond to make sure this project was done. He was the only person putting in those kinds of hours and it wasn't because he slacked off and waited till the last minute to get the job done either! He kept track of his extra hours because his company will let him use comp time. Instead of using paid vacation time he has banked to take time off, he could use those instead and save his vacation hours. That is good in and of itself, but the problem is that he has earned a lot of comp time this year so his vacations hours have accrued quite significantly and he can't take that much time off even if he wanted to! Work is busy and they need him, which, don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful for. These are shaky economic times for a lot of people and we've gone through months of unemployment early on in our marriage so I am definitely not complaining about any of this!

I felt terrible for Raymond during this hectic time at work. He didn't get much sleep and was only home to sleep and shower. Anyway, the project is all done and this isn't something that happens often! He worked super long hours for 12 days straight. Poor guy worked all weekend.

Sorry, it is taking me forever to get to the point of this! One day Raymond sent me a text, asking me if I was sitting down. I started to think maybe he was going to get some sort of cash bonus. I *ahem* immediately started thinking of what we'd do with any extra money. In my mind, it was ALL going to bills. After waiting on pins and needles for what felt like forever, he finally called me. Apparently the project manager really wanted to do something nice for Raymond to thank him for all he did. It was agreed with the big boss that they would give him a vacation.

They are sending our little family of 4 to Disneyland!

We have 2 nights at a hotel of our choice and four 2 Day Park Hopper tickets!

I can hardly believe it! It was such a surprise. We never expected any sort of reward so it is such a blessing to us. We've only been to Disneyland once two years ago and it was because my in-laws blessed us with tickets they won at a Christmas party.

The boys are so excited! And I am too!

We are hoping to go sooner than later. Eeek! I am so frequently reminded of just how good God is to us. We don't have a lot of money, and we don't drive nice cars or live in a nice house, but we have more than we really need. And He loves to surprise us and bless us in unimaginable ways. At first I thought I'd prefer to have money instead of a trip so we could pay off a bill or two. But this way we're forced to actually do something fun and have a special trip and make memories with our boys. Raymond worked really hard and he deserves a real break so what better way to do it!