By Julie

This weekend we reached an important milestone in our financial life: we stuck to our credit card budget two statements in a roll! I haven't been this excited since we paid off all our student loans. Back then it was me wielding the whip that got us there, but I haven't shown much financial restraint since. Sure, I've gone through all the motions of making a budget, but it was just this number in an Excel spreadsheet. Every month I'd pay all the bills and tell Kevin, oh well, we've gone over again.

Finally Kevin got tired of hearing that we weren't putting as much into savings as I'd hoped, so he made it his personal challenge for 2008 to stick to the plan. He started logging into our accounts every week and coloring in a thermometer representing our budget, and during the final week of each billing cycle we've been finding ourselves going to extremes to keep from bursting the thermometer. Not that there's any real consequence to bursting the thermometer. It's just a fun game.



Speaking of games, Alex drew this impressively accurate representation of Pacman using the pattern editor in Animal Crossing. He has never played Pacman before. When we asked him where he'd seen it before, he said he noticed it on somebody's T-shirt. If the kid does not have a photographic memory, I'd say he has something close to it.

Over the 3-day weekend we had a Harry Potter movie marathon at home. By Monday night we'd watched all five movies, and when I went back to work today I was experiencing serious Harry Potter withdrawal. I don't know how I'm going to make it 'til November when the Half-Blood Prince finally comes out.

One thing I noticed was that Alex watched both Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets with rapt attention but barely paid attention to Prisoner of Azkaban, Goblet of Fire, and Order of the Phoenix. Kevin thought it was just short attention span, but I have a different theory. As a kid I never paid much attention to movies or TV shows unless they had at least one character who was my age, and I think that's what happening here. In movies 1 and 2, Harry, Ron, and Hermione were ages 11 and 12, older than Alex but still young enough for him to feel like they're not much older. By the 3rd movie, the characters are 13 years old and full of teenage sturm und drang, and I don't think Alex can relate to that just yet.

With all the lazing around this weekend I experienced the worst leg cramp ever Monday night. My first thought was blood clot (panic!!!) but Kevin assures me I had it this bad the last two pregnancies and rubbed my leg until the pain went away. Also I'm pretty sure my cold is gone and that my runny nose is just due to rhinitis of pregnancy, yet something else I'd experienced the last two times. And finally, I'm back up to +17 pounds, thanks to a huge batch of oatmeal cookies I baked and subsequently ate. (Hey, at least they were made of oatmeal.)

Labels: harry potter, kids, pregnancy, shopping, toys

1 Comments:

• At 5:33 AM,  Rita said…

  Congrats on the budget! I am looking for inspiration. :)

   

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