My son sold the business this morning. Bittersweet. Now he can get a job with benefits and a regular paycheck/schedule (hopefully) We reflected back last night...if the economy hadnt tanked, he would have done very well. In his third year he made almost $100k in sales...and had a three year growth of 15-20%. This year was on track for less than $60k. Not enough to support the expenses and his family. I am proud of him for making this tough call.

I finished up my first week with the temp hours (4:45am to 1:30pm)....getting up that early is new for me, but I LOVE getting off so early. I was able to get so much more done at work having the time in the morning before my staff showed up...and then got so much more done at home having so much of the day left. I am tempted to work this routine into some sort of on-going schedule!!

The only thing I havent really focused on yet is my goal of retiring in 10 years- but I will. That is still a very exciting thought and something I intend to plan out and prepare for! My job offers a great 401k plan, which I am participating in. My employer contributes 8% so long as I contribute at least 5%. While the economy was so depressed, they considered doing away with this benefit. THANKFULLY, that never had to happen!

August and September are very busy birthday months for me. 9 birthdays in all. Two of my grandaughters want Littlest Petshop stuff. I checked them out on Amazon and they seem ridiculously expensive. Having so many birthdays, I HAVE to stick to a budget, which unfortunately does NOT afford many of the Petshop items for either GD. So...I checked on Ebay...and found 4 houses, over 100 pets, and about 100 extra pieces...gently used for $84. (Less than the cost of the houses alone...) And since I budget $40 per grandchild birthday, this fit in nicely with my budget.

My job gets vendor gifts at Christmas..and I always ask for the leftover gift baskets...so I have a couple of nice, big ones. I will use those to 'stage' the stash of petshop items for each girl. At 4 and 6- and the way weve raised them, they will be thrilled and probably will never notice that they arent NEW. I will post pictures when I get them all ready.

Welcome weekend! No big plans, but really looking forward to sleeping in a little tomorrow!!