It's the Little Things

As a single-mom who homeschools, I'm very sensitive to making sure I do it with God's blessing.  It's something too important and too dear to my heart and risk "messing up."

So I am constantly looking for His validation and confirmations that we're on the right path.  Sometimes it comes in an influx of encouragement, Rosalinda being overly excited and verbalizing how thankful she is to be a homeschooler...

Or....

I bought all of our school supplies ahead of time.  I can appreciate tax-free weekend and am happy that so many people benefit from it, but I'm not one to fight crowds, so as soon as Target put it out, I got what we needed.

The only staple supplies that I didn't get and did want to catch on sale were binders.  I usually need four or five 1-inch or 2-inch binders for notebooking and collecting other papers that result from our daily fun.

I also was in need of multicolored pens to coordinate my yearly planner.  A few days after getting my supplies, I was HEB getting groceries and perusing the aisle of everything-a-kid-would-need-and-not-need for school and saw the cutest two-toned binders for $1.49!  Jackpot!

I pick up my pens, get to the checkout only to find that they were mismarked and were actually closer to $5 a piece.  I had to send them back to their shelf. :(

That night, as I sat down to do my yearly plan, I realized that the clerk must've also pulled out the pens and some other supplies to put back on the shelf, but they were still on my receipt.  So at 11 o'clock at night, I trekked my way back to HEB to grab the stuff I needed to get started on my current project.

I explained to the manager what happened, showed him my receipt, and thankfully he said it wouldn't be a problem to go get my supplies.  We walked together to get the pens and whatever else it was that I had already paid for.  Then he asked me to him the binders so he could see why the pricing was confusing.  So I did.

"Do you still want them?"

"Well, I had like 5 in my cart."

"But do you still want them?  I'll ring you up myself and you can have them for the $1.49."

"Yes!"

"Ok, grab the colors you want and meet me at a register."

I quickly grabbed the binders and followed him to a register.

My $25+ total was reduced to a little over $7!

Now my girl has the cool binders she wanted, I got cool-mom points with my tween, and I was blessed with almost $20 in savings!

You know, it's the little things that remind me that God's hand is actively in my life.

What "little" or even BIG things has He done for you lately?  If you homeschool, how does He encourage you?