My Long Night

Yeah, it's almost 4:00 in the morning as I write this. What's got me up at this hour? (And typing on the computer instead of trying to get back to sleep for that matter???) Not my 3 month old, believe it or not (although she is what woke me out of my sound sleep 45 minutes ago).
Money.
I hate it. I hate that we've had money (income, that is) for the last 8 years and now we don't. That's a scary thing. And I mean really scary. It's funny to me that I can actually count the years that we've had income. Our first year of marriage we had nothing. We lived on school loans. I think I might have made $300 a month in my work study position. The rent and tuition money came from school loans. Loans we are still paying off to this day (and will for another 6 years or so I'd guess). I got my first teaching job paying $24,000 in Johnstown in 2000 and I thought that was so much money (compared to nothing it was a lot of money--but I wasn't deluded into thinking I was being well paid mind you). Then in 2001 we moved to the Springs and I started out making $28,000 in D-11. Again, a nice pay raise but not ever thinking that we made a lot of money. I don't even know how much BJ started making. It's always been like that since he started in the AF. Maybe it's because he didn't get a paycheck from the AF for the first few months. Maybe it's because we always seemed to make enough to live on, you know.
I didn't know how nice we had it. Until now. There's something shocking that no one tells you when a spouse looses their job: there will be a time when the money runs out. It's only shocking because it's glaringly obvious and yet you never seem to see it coming. That's why I'm up right now listening to the train whistle blow from across the highway. (On a tangent, I always hated when Toby would be up in the middle of the night but it seemed special to me when he'd quiet down enough from whatever was keeping him up to hear the train whistle. That was just a nice mother-son moment when he'd whisper "the train!" to me.)
And now I've heard something go "bump" in the night twice since I've started typing and I think I'm going to go check it out.....