I didn't see it coming

I guess, since this is the beginning of me telling my story to you, that I should start at where I think the beginning is--

We were an average middle class family. We have a house, a little land, a bunch of animals...we both had "pretty good" jobs. He made a little more than me, and our goal was to pay off our loan for our new well, and pay off my car and his truck, and then I would be able to stay home with our daughter--that's been a dream of mine. I was learning how to cut expenses, shopping second-hand stores, and learning how to cook, so that I could feed us all for very little money. We really didn't have to do that, but because I knew that once we were living on my husband's income only, I knew I'd have to know how to do that.

We paid off the well (this loan is important to make a note of, it plays a part in something that happens in the future), we paid off his truck, and we were well on our way to paying off our car, when my husband started being (for lack of a better way to put it) picked on at work. He started to be more stressed out, but he seemed just like a somewhat more stressed version of himself.

One day he came home and told me that "Best Buy has a laptop on sale for $800". I really didn't get it, I said "So?" He told me that he needed a laptop for work, so that he could document the things people were saying to him. I thought the documenting was a good idea, but most people can do that without spending $800 on a laptop. I asked him how he was going to pay for it, and he said "charge it", and my eyes just about popped out of my head. I begged him to give himself time to think about it, maybe a couple of weeks at least, to see if he really did need one. I suggested that if he really needed one, he should try to find a used one. WE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE INTERNET SERVICE! I told him that if we put our minds to it, we could save up the $800 in no time. He told me he was just "going to go and look".

Since we had perfect credit, he had no trouble charging a $2500 laptop and a $3000 camera, too, along with accessories. I was hurt and angry, and I didn't understand how he could all of a sudden throw our goals out the window. In hindsight, I recognize that this was the first concrete sign I had that something was terribly wrong, but at the time, I just thought my husband was being extremely selfish and disrespectful. This was somewhere around August of 2006.