Well, even though birthday month is over (it bled into April since AA had to reschedule her party due to strep) life hasn't settled down at all. Work has been really busy, AS has a ton of nighttime obligations (teaching, board meetings) and so does NT (his hat business seems to have reached some kind of tipping point where he's in high demand -- which is exciting for him but means he goes out even more often). I too have had some night things such as dinners with clients, music shows, hanging out with friends ...

Anyway, there's been a bit more spending than usual, and also the medical bills have started to roll in from our March illnesses. Oh, and my mammogram came up with something that needs a follow-up ... I think I've had maybe one that hasn't, out of 4 or 5, so I'm not worried, but it typically runs me about $600 to get a follow-up exam. I think I might check into how much it would cost to just get the 3D mammogram (which isn't fully covered like the regular one), because if it's less than $600 and requires fewer follow-ups, it might be worth it. It's so hard to figure these things out, but maybe I'll ask the mammogram place to run an estimate by my insurance company or something.

I scheduled the follow-up for early May. Of course in the back of my mind I realize it could be something -- that's why I'm not ignoring it -- but I'm just not too worried since this seems to happen every time.

So a day or so ago, I was feeling like this deficit would never go away. We want to be saving really hard for the kitchen and for travel, but I finally gave in to the idea that maybe we should pull some of those savings back out to just take care of the deficit. We had a family meeting, talked about upcoming expenses and the current deficit, and decided that we could take some out of reno savings, even though it will set back the date we can start working on the kitchen. We decided to keep the meeting with our designer and contractor in May, because that will give us a much better idea of the number we're saving toward, but we pulled nearly $5K out of savings and used about $2K to eliminate the shared spending deficit. I'm holding the rest of it separate from our shared spending but will put it there as needed (like when medical bills come in... such as the nearly $900 bill for NT's ER visit when urgent care was closed and he had to get his cough checked out...sigh...but I insisted he go in, so I have only myself to blame for that one).

We also agreed that probably we'll only do one solo trip per adult this year instead of the 2 we each did last year. With three family trips planned (two to Va. and one to UK after Xmas) and everything else that's come up, unless we get a big financial boost we'll try to stick to that.

Our kitchen savings are at about $20K now. But we feel better not having that shared spending deficit staring us in the face all the time. I think it's OK to admit that our expenses exceeded our spending money, as long as we're taking the money from something optional (like renovations) and not from like the EF or retirement or anything.

Other goals...I've been trying a looser approach to drinking and screens and it's been going so-so. I was hoping to average 3-4 days per week of 0-1 drinks, and it has been more like 1-2 days per week for the first two weeks. Still, it's better than my habits were in 2017, so that's something. Screens have been hard to measure because I just haven't had a lot of downtime anyway. I'd say I'm a little better at not being on screens all the time than I was before my Jan-March days of enforced no-screen time, but I could do better.

I've been practicing up a storm on guitar but haven't made any progress on my writing goal. I haven't added to my preparedness supplies because of the ongoing shared spending deficit and probably won't for a while, but we did have some organic EP progress. There was a tornado warning siren test and NT took the opportunity to run some drills with the kids about getting to the basement. He also went over fire drill procedures and talked about the rope ladder and fire extinguishers we have. While we were at it, I showed them how to access 911 on my phone even when it was locked, and when I asked them to demonstrate it today, they both did it correctly. So we have made a little bit of emergency preparedness progress this week!