Welcome to the forum missyfisshy.
As others have already said, you are very welcome here and we will do our best to help you get through your first fish tank's cycle. Something that few new fish keepers understand is the filter cycling process. As it turns out, you cannot simply add fish to a sterile environment and expect them to thrive. Fish produce some ammonia from their gills as well as having any decaying food or fish wastes produce even more ammonia. Ammonia is toxic to fish in very low concentrations so we all do our best to develop functional bacterial filters that will remove ammonia from the water. The way ammonia is removed from water by bacteria leads to producing nitrites, another toxic chemical for fish. As it turns out, nitrites can be converted to nitrates by beneficial bacteria.
What we strive to do as fish keepers is develop enough nitrogen processing bacteria in our filters to remove not only the ammonia but also the nitrites. A mature filter will remove almost any amount of both chemicals and keep your fish safe. If you can afford a liquid type testing kit, try to keep your ammonia and nitrites below about 0.25 ppm to avoid any toxicity. That may mean rather large water changes in your tank at frequent intervals. If you cannot afford to do the testing, you may still see some success by doing a moderately large water change each day for about 6 weeks. The 6 weeks value is rather arbitrary but is long enough, in most cases, to see you through a fish-in cycle of your tank. I have seen very few fish-in cycles that took longer than that although it is entirely possible that it will take longer than that. If you keep your fish loading low and do frequent water changes, you will be likely to have very little health effect on the fish you use to cycle your tank. To me that means your fish, after the cycle's complete, will be more likely to thrive and even reproduce. I have had lots of good results using common livebearers for this purpose over the years.
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