Money Kids get for Birthdays

One of the things that is very popular for our kids to receive is money for birthdays and other gifting occassions. We allow them to buy some things that they want with the cash and we also use it to go get things that they need. Problem today is that it was all in a pile and we were scratching our heads trying to figure out how much each kid had been given and how much eavh had spent without having a written record. Now, spending the kids money is my wife's area of responsibility for the most part.

Lets just say we were both stressing out but across the kids we got down to a nine dollar disparity from the initial 75 dollar disparity. We didn't come up with more money, my wife remembered the purchase of cookies at the mall (very expesnive, high overhead and good tasting from what I hear). Anyway, budget and money is something that is stressful but I would like to say that I am proud of my wife as she kept her cool, she did awesome. Dave Ramsey and is financial planning has really helped us out with dealing with finances and getting on a better track than we were.

As to the rest of the world, my now 7.5 month old is actually crawling a little, most of it is belly army crawling but she does some real crawling. Of course, she can pull herself up standing on things too. That is scary. Maybe I will have to loud up blogger in draft and upload some videos for everyone to see. Would also give me a chance to compare it to myspace and youtube video features.

Today is the last day of my training at work and we are going to do some work on multi-tasking with the new computer software in a simulated environment. Tommorow I am going back to the center and will work on overtime shift one 1 of my 2 days off this week, but since that isn't my normal day off and it backs up to my normal two days off I will get 2 in a row after that. Of course next week I will probably have 4-5 12 hour days. This will be going on for the next 4 weeks or so and it sounds like we are probably getting ready to loose a few more people in the department, good for me that this will boost seniority but its going to mean a long long time of lots of overtime and the new stress of restarting homeschooling while I am running on low and it takes quite a long time for us to get people hired, trained and out working on their own.

Now, starting tommorow the older two kids are taking off with my parents for a Gulf of Mexico beach week in Texas. They are going to have so much fun on this trip and my wife and I will not know what to do with just two kids here at the house. I think we are going to rent a movie (Pirates of the Carribean 2) and then possibly try to go watch a movie as well or go out to eat or both. We are also going to have the assesment packet from our homeschool academy that we signed up for to go through starting this week. I am very excited.

Don't forget to vote in the Pocast awards for your favorite SQPN shows, and if you don't know what SQPN is, its a great Catholic Podcasting network. Kick the radio habit and get into podcasts, you can control the content and listen to stuff from EWTN, SQPN, and several other places around the net. On the left sidebar I keep a scrolling run of things that are in my MP3 player.

God bless, pray for us as we work on our children's classical education. Maybe I should blog about that and I am working on the topic idea for the Catholic Dads Carnival, suggestions are always appreciated.

Under the Mercy,

Matthew S


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