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- Welcome to 2023! A new year – a “fresh start” – a clean slate. The perfect time to dig in and look at your life and figure out what’s working, what’s not, and if there is anything you can do to make things better. (Wow, look at me getting all philosophical on a Saturday morning! I promise, it’s just because Derrick and I were JUST talking, over making breakfast, about how we need to re-arrange, re-configure a few things in our house to make things work better for us, and it has my brain firing on this whole “look at things from a new perspective” challenge!)
- As usual, the “Abby in a winter hat” is my first Abby’s Saturday photo of the year! I actually put a completely different hat on her for this photo and it looked so hilariously stupid that we changed it up (maybe those photos will make it into the 2023 Abby’s Saturday bloopers?)
If you’d like to go back & see the other hats Abby has worn in years past, you can see those here: #386, #332, #280, #181, #129, #21 (it’s a good progression to show our poor pup’s grey hair coming in around her nose – poor girl!) - So, Christmas and New Years has once again come and gone at a break-neck pace. I’m not going to talk at length about our holidays because I already posted a “Christmas Overview” post, but I will say that it was wonderful and amazing (and just way too fast).
- We’ve spent this week working at getting back into our normal “routines” – we took the last 2 full weeks off of school, and that proved to be so good for both the kids and me. Besides a 2 day break at Thanksgiving, we haven’t taken a break since we started the school year – so it was much needed.
On the flip side, it’s been super tough to get back to our normal school rhythms. Braelynn’s been grumpy about it, so my Mom sent me this idea for a “good attitude” punch card. Every day that school is completed without complaining or a bad attitude, she can punch a circle of her card – and once she fills the card, she can pick a reward (we made a list of things that include a $5 Target gift card, getting an ice cream treat, staying up past bedtime for a movie one night – fun stuff like that). And so far – that has been a big winner! Braelynn is super rewards oriented – so needless to say: the last half of our school week went much better than the first half! - The new year also means it’s time to pull all of our tax stuff together. Derrick and I own 3 businesses that we have to file for this year, so that’s lots of paperwork. I always start by balancing my Kara Abbey Photography ledger (I am super old school and use an Excel spreadsheet – I know the cool kids nowadays use Quickbooks, but I can’t bring myself to pay for it). Normally, I have one or two missing transactions that I forget to write down during the year, but I typically can balance my books in one sitting. I used to work at a bank and balancing our own drawers and other people’s accounts was something we did on the daily, so I’m pretty good at it (if I do say so myself).
This year, I went through everything – and the bank was showing that I had $14.76 more than I did. Weird – that’s definitely an odd number to be off. So, I figured I had transposed a number or messed up my calculations somewhere along the line, so I went back through my entire year, line by line, again. No luck.
Just in case you’re curious: I was comparing my ledger with my actual bank statements and my credit card statements. So, it wasn’t like I wasn’t getting my information directly from the source.
I looked for this discrepancy for 3 days.
I thought I was going to go insane. I was beginning to pull my hair out. I could feel my stress and anxiety levels going through the roof the more time went by that I could not figure this out. My calculations were solid. My numbers were perfect. Why did the bank say I had $14.76 more than I did?
Finally, on Thursday night, I planned to sit down and re-create each month of the year, so I could pinpoint what month the error was made in. I opened a new spreadsheet and typed out all of the transactions from the month, and then attempted to balance it to my January bank statement. By this point, my brain was absolute mush and I could not make it work, so I asked my lovely husband if he would help me for just a few minutes to get January balanced (thinking I would then just replicate the process through the other months). Derrick is really smart about money, so I should have asked for his help sooner, but I digress.
He came into my office, I showed him what I was doing, gave him a rundown of what I needed help with, he looked over a few things and then said: “Where is your December bank statement?” I didn’t have it pulled up because I was balancing for 2022 not 2021. He said, “I just want to see it really quick.” So, I pulled it up, and there – as the very very last line, I had a credit to my account from Amazon for $14.76.
Mic drop.
I literally turned around to him and half sobbed/half laughed into his shoulder. There was my missing number.
I typically try to balance my accounts during the last week of the year (just in case there’s an issue, then I can fix it). So in 2021, I balanced my 2021 ledger before the end of the year. So, that Amazon credit had not hit my account yet. And since I wasn’t expecting it, I just started fresh with my balanced number, never realizing that I had one last 2021 transaction that I had never accounted for.
You have no idea the relief I felt. I wasn’t crazy after all.
Ledgers balanced – I moved on to put together both of my profit/loss sheets, Derrick’s profit/loss, the mileage for both of our businesses – we’re now officially ready for tax time (yay).
(I felt like I was re-living the one time I had a MAJOR discrepancy at the bank, and I looked for that error for MONTHS – I never found it.) - And now that that’s all done – I can officially begin the FUN “end of year” stuff – pulling together the Abby’s Saturday Bloopers from last year, writing our “behind-the-scenes” blog, pulling my favorite images for the year & prepping for those blog posts, beginning the process of designing our family yearbook from 2022 – now the fun can begin!
- We did take down our Christmas decorations this week. It’s SUPER early – we normally leave them up until closer to Braelynn’s birthday, but we are going to be renovating our dining room in about 10 days, so we needed to start the process of cleaning it out!
Speaking of renovating – we finally ripped out the built-in bench that’s been in our living room ever since we moved in. Now that we have our mudroom/entryway, we don’t need that bench anymore, so Derrick ripped it out last Monday – repaired the wall and painted it (it’s still a bit rough, but it’ll due for now). With the bench gone, we were able to move our living room furniture around – in anticipation of us moving our dining room furniture into our living room temporarily. Whew! It’s like this huge moving machine over here – task one, leads to task two, which leads to task three – after we renovate the dining room, we’ll be ordering new carpet for our living room (especially since now we have this odd bare spot where the bench used to be) – things are just rolling right along! - One of Leander’s Christmas presents from my parents was a tent. Somehow, it got missed on Christmas Day, so he received it as a “belated” Christmas gift this week! He and Braelynn instantly went bonkers over it and wanted to set it up – we put it in the living room originally – and after spending all day long playing in it, Leander asked if he could sleep in his tent. I said, “Sure, why not?” So, we moved the tent upstairs to his bedroom, where we moved a few things around (seems to be the theme of this first week of January “moving a few things around”) and put his bed inside of his new tent. He was in heaven. He loved it so much! And after a successful night of sleeping in it, he invited Braelynn to sleep in it last night with him for a “sleep over”! They actually did so much better than I had dared to hope! They went to sleep right away, slept all night, and didn’t get up until around 7am this morning (which is “sleeping in” in our house).
- In other news: TODAY is the anniversary of the day we got our Abby-dog!! TWELVE years ago today, we went and met this crazy, super-hyper, hurricane of a pup, and decided to bring her home with us. She’s been our girl ever since. We love you Abby!
[…] yes, my “traditional” first Abby’s Saturday of the year is typically Abby in some sort of hat – but I had to make an exception with our lovely […]