AS checked my Google AdSense account (I hadn't thought about it since I linked this blog to it) and said I've made over $2 since Jeffrey's announcement! If you haven't done so already, I recommend setting yours up. A small amount of effort and then the snowflakes will start to come in.

We got an itemized statement from our lawyer regarding the adoption. Apparently we did the right thing taking the flat-fee route, because fees would have been about a thousand more bucks if we hadn't! The option we chose also included a $1000 "refundable" trust, and it looks like they only used about $875 of that for court costs. I wonder if we'll get a refund of the rest eventually? If the two sides of the bill are handled separately, as it seems, then we probably will. That will go into little SL's savings, since we haven't put aside very much for her yet!

I got my 30K bonus miles from my Delta Amex, so now we can combine them all and basically shave $1200 off our airfare if we book using one of the Delta cards. And we'll need it, with prices to England looking the way they do. Ouch!

In recent weeks I applied us all for the BoA Visa card, spend $500 get $100 back. AS and I got approved but NT was turned down. They gave us our credit scores in the letters, which I appreciated. AS and I are at 800+ and NT is in the high 700s. Then I applied all three of us for a USBank Visa that offered a $150 statement credit for spending $500. NT got accepted, AS got turned down and I haven't heard back (assuming I got rejected due to it being SO close to the BoA application).

Anyway, I'm happy about our credit scores, and we did get three out of the six cards we tried for. So we'll spend $1500 and get $350 back. Not too shabby! I immediately put $500 of NT's medical bill on his new card and $500 on AS's and the last $12 on mine. I also paid a few more bills with mine, and paid for my trivia treats with it, and bought snacks for work ($75 that I'll get reimbursed, so it's not even my money really!).

I had to pretty much drain the medical fund to be able to pay these cards off. I knew it was coming, but it's not a pretty sight to see my medical fund at less than $50, and not entirely sure the bills have stopped coming in. But I still haven't touched my EF, so that's still there if we absolutely need it. Maybe I'll use the $350 of CC rewards to cashflow any medical expenses that come in this year, and then put it in savings if I don't need it. We'll see.

I can't remember if I mentioned this, but AS's cellphone got ruined (along with the SIM card). We're a bit behind where I want us to be in prepaid costs, so I looked around for the cheapest way to get her up and running. I bought a SIM card for 99 cents (got one for NT as well, since I'm going to switch him to T-Mobile in a couple months), and I tried several eBay auctions for dirt-cheap unlocked T-Mobile phones. Finally I got one for $5.50 with free shipping. It's bulky by today's standards with an antenna! AS had said she wasn't picky about what phone I got her, but she wasn't happy with that at all. So I switched my SIM card over to it and gave her my slightly more modern flip phone. Problem solved for $6.49! It's scratched up and the sound effects are hilariously old-timey, but it works so I'm happy.

And I'm definitely moving NT over to T-Mobile, now that I know how cheap it will be to get him a "new" phone if his Net10 one isn't compatible. Of course, he's not going to want the type I got either, but hopefully I can find a relatively cheap flip phone. Or maybe his Net10 device will work; I don't see why it shouldn't. I'm beginning to think they just act like you need one of their phones so you'll have to pay more.

This week has flown by and somehow I haven't made a menu plan yet. We need to get that done tonight so we can do grocery shopping tomorrow! We're a bit behind so will need to be careful making a grocery list (what else is new these days?).