So this isn’t exactly an subtraction and numbers update in the sense that the Sunday night posts have been because I had to revamp the whole durn thing today. We are pretty much down to the wire and are supposed to go on vacation on Friday. The long and the short of it is this. I messed up. I was too optimistic.
Given the budget I had outlined, we were good with a bit of wiggle room. Unfortunately, I focused too much on the wiggling. Each week, we slightly wiggled. And I confess, I did not report it. Here are a few wiggles that came up.
Addie and I went to Great Clips and got our hair cut.
Jeremy bought a new cable for our Wii because it wasn’t working.
We paid for some friends to go on an activity with us.
We joined the Y. I did not budget for that, but mainly, driving to the Y several times a week contrasts greatly with our normal routine of going nowhere-ever. So instead of spending maybe $80 a month on gas, we have been spending about twice that. Hmmm . . . . bad.
Long story short, I realized today that it was looking pretty thin in the accounts, so I decided to recalculate the math. Even though I thought that we were doing okay, it turns out, we’ve over-wiggled. After our bills are paid, we have $140 a week for the next 5.5 weeks. (Payday August 25th. Anyone else counting the minutes?) No wiggling. Not at all. Not even for vacation.
I think I thought that we’d be wildly successful and be so great at this that there’d be money left over.
Whatever.
I think the revamping and subsequent wailing and gnashing of teeth must have broken the computer because our main computer is having a death of sorts in the other room. This is a discouraging night.
Tomorrow is supposed to be the start of my writing week. I’ve had a novel in my mind for almost 9 months now and J is giving me this week to go write it in the mornings. But now the computer is broken, so I might have to leave the laptop, seriously hindering the outpour of novel. Plus Addie has a fever so she might not be able to go to VBS, which was sort of what was going to enable me to go since J would only have two kids to deal with. So even though I was already going to have to write my entire novel between 9-12 AM this Mon-Thurs, now I might not even have that.
This is where (I love you Mom) my mom’s optimism may be a bad thing. Did I actually think I could write my novel in 12 hours? Yes, yes I did. Did I actually think that with more kids, more time on our hands, and more places to go, we could live off of less money? Yes I did.
Perhaps, this will be public failure. Oh joy.
Grrr. I’m posting this without a picture because there is nothing to illustrate despair so well as nothing. Plus all the pictures are on the other computer and if we lose them, well that would really be dispair.
First of all, this may be way late and not a help, but you can totally borrow Mike’s laptop until he is back. It’s a Mac and is sitting unused at this time. Second, your over optimism is only bad if you let it undo the joy you have experienced this summer thus far. Going over a couple hundred dollars is NO BIG DEAL. Lighten up. (I love you). You can be very proud of being so debt free but look around and give yourself an extra pat on the back. Most people are thousands and thousands of dollars in the hole and still spend retarded amounts of money of spitting in the wind. So cheer up! Who cares if there is $200 bucks on the credit card at the end of the summer? IT WAS WELL SPENT.
Ditto to Laura…and remember that you have a GREAT sister =)
You have amazed me with what you’ve been able to do so far, Katrina! Your drive to do so much for such a great thing (family focus) is amazing.
The beauty of this story isn’t in what the $bottom line$ is at the end of the summer… the beauty is the story and your heart that went along with it.
You’ve won either way…