A hole in the wall

There's a hole in the wall. It's been there for years. It happened after years of a young red-headed boy slamming the bathroom door open against the wall. We put a door stopper on the hinge of the door to prevent the hole in the wall, but learned quickly two important facts. First, a door in a narrow hallway is not a good place to use such a stopper. The stopper doesn't allow the door to open all the way and so when the door is open it blocks the hallway. Second, these cute little door stoppers don't work well on hollow doors. So, there's a hole in the door, too!

The hole was patched over a couple years ago, awaiting paint that has yet to come. In the meantime, a certain young boy decided it would be best to push the plaster into hole, thus reopening it. So, there it sits--the hole in the wall.

Recently, Matt and I noticed a cute little girl grab a small toy out of her toy bin and run immediately to the hole in the wall. Then, the small toy was missing. "Did she just..." "I don't know. What did she have?" Just as quickly, cute toddler runs back to the other toys.

A couple days later, as I'm packaging empty food boxes (stuffing with newspaper and sealing with clear packing tape) for the cute little girl to use in her grocery cart, I see the same pattern--small toy, quick run to hole in wall, missing toy. I go over to check out the hole. Of course, I can't see anything inside of it. While cut toddler looks intrigued, I place the conveniently timed piece of packing tape over the hole. No more toys in the hole.

There's a hole in the wall, with toys in side. It's covered with packing tape. Honestly, we try really hard not to be rednecks, but sometimes it's hard.

A Happy New Year

One of my friends invited me to join a Happiness Project Group with her. The group is based on Gretchen Rubin's book, "The Happiness Project". We met at the end of 2010, having read the book and set up our individual happiness projects. This required us to contemplate what makes us happy and to devise a plan for each month of the year to work toward happiness.

My January Goals are based on Financial Peace! Financial Peace would certainly make me happy! Specifically, I have to reserve my credit card for emergencies only, not spend more than I have (as in, not spending into the "cushion" that is created when I know my automatic payments won't be deducted for another two weeks). I have also vowed to shop sales versus paying full price for things. Finally, I want to stop overbuying (as in, don't buy enough grocery staples to last a six months when I go to the grocery store weekly).

I had a pretty good budget going into the new year, but I tweaked it a bit. On paper, we can pay our bills and that's about it. I'm not sure how, but we are overspending like crazy. I need to be more cognisant of those times that our income is higher than budgeted and instead of spending frivolously, pay down our debt.

Wish me luck!