Thankful for interruptions today

We didn't start school on time this morning. First, we slept in a little after a late night last night. Then we were notified that my sister and her husband are going to be moving closer to us. We were so excited that of course we had to take time for a phone call for that! My parents can't believe that both of their daughters are going to be back living in the Midwest soon.

Second, I checked our bank balance and I thought there was a mistake because the balance was so high. I was so surprised that we had our tax refund deposited already. I paid a few bills with this refund and put the rest in savings.

Third, we made a phone call because we previously received a discount for a subscription we received and I didn't know if we still qualified for that discount since Ram is no longer pastor at a church. We found out that we could continue to have that discount. It's only a $20 discount, but I am glad we can still have this membership.

Also today Ram took the lawnmower in to be serviced before our yard needs it; we baked a birthday cake for Lamb 3; and Lamb 2 had gymnastics class. We did eventually get to our school work because we plan to take off Monday in honor of Lamb 3's birthday. It was a full but good day and I am thankful for the interruptions that we did have.

Quick Family Update

1. I think we are finally all healthy. We missed a week of homeschool while the Lambs and I were sick with a cold/cough/fever. It was a rough week where nothing got done. This week is very busy making up doctor checkups etc. It was so ridiculous that I was too sick to go to the doctor for a thyroid checkup and appointments like that. We are finally scheduled to make some of that up. I am so thankful that we never had stomach flu at our house, just the colds.
2. Our church had a wedding on Feb. 5 during the regular Sunday morning service. I do plan to blog more about the wedding soon. The wedding reminded me of our wedding with the same version of the Te Deum that we used. Ram was happy to have a copy of the music in front of him because he did not have a copy during our wedding and he did not have it memorized like I did!
3. Our church has a fish fry fundraiser for medical expenses for one of our members coming up on Friday. We are happy to be going to help on the fundraiser day. I am so impressed with all the behind the scenes work people from our congregation are doing to get ready for this fundraiser. We are praying for a very successful fundraiser to help this family.
4. The ladies at my mom's church are having an apron party this spring. I have dug out some of my books and aprons to help my mom with her planning. It has been fun to get all that out and look at it again.
5. I volunteered to present at a teacher's conference this fall. I don't know if I will be asked to speak or if they will have enough speakers, but I am hoping for a chance to do a little back in the teaching world again.
6. Ram is working hard on his schooling. Reading, writing papers, and doing interviews are all going well.
7. The Lambs are continuing with homeschooling and piano lessons and confirmation class at church. We just keep plugging along and when we finish one book we go on to the next.
8. Because I was sick I have not gotten everything together for our tax lady yet. Hopefully I can finish that by early next week.
9. The dishwasher is fixed. There was some food stuck in it and when that was removed it worked fine. It motivates me to scrape/rinse the dishes a little more. If I owned this house I would invest in a better dishwasher, but I don't so it means scraping and rinsing better.
10. We are studying what activities and day camps this area offers for this summer. So far Lamb 1 and 2 want to do several camps and Lamb 3 hasn't found any that he is interested in. I think it will be a very busy couple of months being chauffeur for what each Lamb is interested in. I am going to look into what the Science Museum offers because I think that is more what Lamb 3 would like to do instead of sports like his brothers. I am happy to let them do different activities in the summer for a week or two instead of committing to an entire fall or entire spring of chauffeuring. Plus I like that they can try out a wide variety of activities and see what interests they would like to pursue more.

To Do List Update

• Tax paperwork is ready to submit to our tax preparer. This year seemed extra difficult-there were problems with our paycheck company information, health savings account information, etc. I am so thankful for our church treasurer and her help for all this bookkeeping! I am still determined to organize the 2015 paperwork for taxes now, but that is not finished yet.
• Ram and I began cataloging the last two bookcases in his office. These are large bookcases, but we can see the end in sight. Our catalog list is now over 7000 books in our home/his church office.
• I began going through more of my teaching files. I have completed 7 out of 12 file cabinet drawers. When this project is completed there will be some empty drawers and none of the drawers will be packed full.
• We finished reading the book for February for library family book club. We are beginning to read the book for Lamb 2's book club. We read the books as family read alouds.
• Now that taxes are done and the end is in sight for cataloging Ram's books, I am starting to come up with a plan of what to declutter at home next. I love seeing declutter progress!

Good news and bad news

Bad news: Lamb 3 was sick last night. He threw up several times while Ram and the other Lambs slept through it all. I didn't get much sleep because I needed to help him several times. He took a shower early this morning and then slept in. I am busy cleaning bathrooms and doing laundry today. I'm praying everyone gets healthy before Lamb 1's standardized testing next week and also his birthday party.

Good news: Lamb 3 seems to be fine now and no one else seems to have it. He's taking it easy eating-saltines and pop today.

Good news: We qualified for a small earned income credit on our taxes.

Bad news: I didn't expect to qualify so I didn't send in the correct paperwork. Now we need to get the proper signatures. I understand that they want to prevent tax fraud, but this is a pain.

Good or bad news?: The Lambs and Ram are scheduled to go on a hike tomorrow with Cub Scouts. I'm not sure they will all be healthy enough to do that tomorrow. There will be some disappointed Lambs if they can't. I'm not sure how much Ram wants to go so it may be good news for him if they can't. I conveniently have a meeting at church to attend at the same time.

Not my fault!

Yesterday I canceled school due to Lamb 2's doctor appointment and the public school kids having President's Day off. I figured it was a good time to sit down and get all my papers in order for our tax lady.

I began filling out the checklist and I couldn't find the mortgage interest statement. I then spent a couple of hours going through my papers looking for it. I was very frustrated, I have never been this organized with my paperwork as I was this year. I thought it was just going to take a little while to fill out the form with the numbers I already entered in my spreadsheet.

I finally gave up at bedtime and told Ram we would have to call them tomorrow and even if there was a fee get a new one. It was not filed where it was supposed to be nor near where it was supposed to be.

When we called them today, they answered that they were mailed in January but the post office was about 3 weeks behind due to weather there. I hadn't misfiled it, I never received it! With almost 60 degree days here recently, it never crossed my mind that weather was holding it up.

He was able to give me the numbers that I needed over the phone but I'm going to try to wait for the statement to arrive to give all the correct info to my tax lady. I wish I hadn't wasted so much time looking for it yesterday, but it was a relief that it wasn't my fault. Hopefully it will arrive this week and I can get everything to my tax lady soon.

Tax Day

I had all our info together to send to our tax lady earlier than I ever have. I think we mailed it to her on February 14. I have to get everything together, but then we send the info to a wonderful tax preparer in Fort Wayne that specializes in church workers. Church workers get a little complicated and we appreciate their  knowledge if we would ever be audited.
We received a nice refund from both the state and federal. Federal was a few hundred more than what we had paid in estimated tax through the year. So I consider that we received a few hundred more than we already paid in-not that we received a huge federal refund.
This was the first year our tax preparer had mandatory e-file and we also got our info in so early that we received our state refund several weeks ago and our federal refund a few weeks ago. It was nice to deposit the federal refund in savings to be ready to pay estimated tax each quarter this year. The state refund will probably be used to pay for the rise in gas prices. I was thankful that we didn't have to pay. I had been worried because Ram had received disability pay above his regular salary. It's nice to have those checks deposited in the bank when others are paying their taxes today!
I enjoy reporting what our taxes show about each year here. Here's the 2010 report:
Vehicle: We traded in our minivan for another minivan very similar to the old one with less miles in October.
Medical: This was a huge medical year but insurance was very good to us.
Medical miles driven: 4461
Medical dollars spent out of our pocket: $6194
Ewe had a miscarriage in February.
Lamb 1 got more caps on his teeth in April.
Lamb 2 had his first filling in September.
Ewe had testing to see why she had some miscarriages.
Ram had lots of testing in the summer to find out why his blood work at his regular physical came back abnormal.
Ram had surgery at Mayo to remove one kidney and a benign mass the size of a football.
Ewe got new glasses.
Ram as a pastor: Ram did 3 funerals (there were other funerals but he was recovering from surgery or on vacation). 1 baptism.
Ram processed in with the pastors for the installation of LCMS including Rev. Harrison in Saint Louis in September.
Ram was a LCMS Synodical Convention delegate to Houston in July.
Ram did not attend any other conventions out of state this year.
Ram received disability pay while he recovered from his surgery in the fall.
Ram drove 5980 miles for the church.

You could compare 2010 to 2009 for our family here.
How did your taxes turn out this year? Refund or owe? Better or worse than last year?

Family Update

I have a bunch of topics to blog about, but we've been busy and I can't blog about all of them now. Here's a little of what we have been doing recently.
*We're back to homeschooling all subjects. Last week we had school every day except Sunday. I'll have a big weekly homeschool report soon. I'm proud of the progress that Lamb 1 and 2 are making.
*I ordered some audio CDs of stories for the Lambs. They listen to these at bedtime. It doesn't seem so bad to go to bed when you get to listen to a story. We aren't far enough into technology to go beyond CDs in their room. We live too far away from the library to take advantage of that. I think this was a wise investment to get a few more CDs for our collection as they were tired of the ones we owned before. I like that they are getting a few more minutes of homeschool when they listen to these classic stories. The Lambs stay in their room for the whole CD because they don't want to miss a minute of the story while they go to the bathroom. They usually fall asleep by the end of the CD.
*Ram has a checkup at Mayo soon. Please pray for good results and a safe trip. We are praying that this is his last trip to Mayo and if he needs more tests or checkups they can be done locally. He will have a bunch of tests done and see his doctor that did the surgery.
*I got all my papers filed instead of in a big pile so I'm ready to get everything together to send to our tax lady.
*We made good headway on writing/making thank you notes last week. We still have more to do and I'm embarrassed that January is almost over and we haven't finished thank you notes for Christmas yet. The church members were very generous this year which is a good thing, but we have a ton of thank you notes to write. I'm having the Lambs write/make notes for each person that gave them a gift. Hopefully people will understand that it takes the Lambs a long time to make their notes so that is why it took so long.
*Ram took the Lambs to a library program last night about feet. They measured their feet, did an art project by tracing their foot and decorating it, ate foot long subs, and a whole bunch of other fun activities. It was wonderful for Ewe to have an evening alone to try to get things done at home.
*Ewe took the Lambs to a drop in play time at ECFE this morning. It was good to get the Lambs out to play with other kids, do art, and see the teachers. We took last semester off of ECFE. We're going to try to continue this play time in February. I had to laugh though, during play time the Lambs played together with the doll house almost the whole time-not with other toys, not with other kids.
*I've been trying a bunch of new recipes, most of them from vegetariantimes.com . Last night I made chickpea tagine with carrots, cinnamon, and cumin and at first I didn't think that Ram liked it. Tonight he said he liked it and he was full after just one bowl. Everyone ate it except for Lamb 3 so it was more of a success than I thought it was at first.
*I'm going to try to get our paperwork together for taxes and finish thank you notes and put the Christmas decorations away (they're down, but on the guest room bed) so I'm going to concentrate on that and not blog much. Hopefully I'll be back soon when my projects are done.

Tax Day

Esther posted this question today so I'm using it as my idea for a post today.

Did you receive a refund or did you owe?

We send our taxes to a wonderful accountant that specializes in church workers in Fort Wayne, IN. We have had a pattern the last few years of the years that we had a baby we got a huge refund and the years that we didn't have a baby, we owed. I still don't know why it was working out this way-maybe we spent more of our housing allowance the years that we had a baby? Since we didn't have a baby last year, I expected to owe.

We pay estimated taxes each quarter because pastors are considered self employed. For Federal we are receiving ALL of that estimated taxes that we paid back in our refund plus another $905. We did not pay any estimated taxes to the state. We are receiving $777 refund from the state.

1. Thank you to the Congress for part of this refund because Ram bought a new car last year.
2. Thank you to President Bush and the prior Congress for most of this refund.

It bugs me when people say they are getting a huge refund and they have an excuse to make big purchases with their refund. The refund was their money that they earned, the government either kept it out of their check or they paid estimated taxes and the government had their money. While the government had their money they didn't get any interest or get to invest their money. The government was their savings account without any interest for that year. But in our case this year, our refund really was $905 and $777 MORE than we paid in. We haven't received our refund yet, but it will probably be spent on medical bills that we know are coming.

Our state refund was interesting to me, especially because we did not pay any money in estimated taxes. Of course it is more complicated than this, but $25 was "lower income motor fuels tax credit" and $752 was "Minnesota working family credit" for our 3 Lambs.

Unfortunately, my sister did not do so well. She had several jobs last year that all pay a little more than minimum wage and no benefits. She has had a lot of medical bills after her knee surgeries. She works as a church secretary for one of her jobs and that is considered self employed. She owes $900 even after all of her jobs besides church secretary withheld taxes for her. She currently doesn't have a job (besides the church secretary) and has no money to pay this $900. It just shows how messed up this whole tax system is. Unfortunately, I think the current Congress is going to make it worse for ALL of us and we are very close to the end of refunds like my family received this year.

I read on the internet that a lot of stores/restaurants are having good deals today in honor of tax day. We live too far away to take advantage of the deals, but check it out if you plan to go to Starbucks or McDonalds or other places.

So, did you receive a refund or did you owe?

Our other good news-I'm not sure if it was last night or today (because it was around midnight), but a baby girl was born in our tri-parish last night. This is a big deal because this is only the 3rd baby besides our Lambs that has been born while we have been here the last 7 years. Ram has done some other baptisms for grandchildren that want to be baptized at their home church, but there are only 2 active families in our church with young children besides our family. Of course Ram took the message and didn't ask what the name of the baby was, but he'll visit them soon and I'll find out!

My doctor appointment

We drove 2 hours one way and I spent less than 30 minutes with the doctor. He explained the different lab tests they can do. Unfortunately since the tests are sent to Mayo, the tests could not be done on Friday. They have to be done early in the week, in the morning so there is time to send them to Mayo. He was trying to figure out how I could get the lab work done closer to home. The nurse explained how expensive these tests are and how important it was to get them done in the morning etc. I decided then that I would rather go back to their lab instead of risking the local lab messing it up. So I will make the 4 hour round trip on Monday by myself to get the lab work done.
Ram and I are also both going to take some antibiotics. There is the possibility that one of us has an infection. It's cheaper and easier to treat with a low dose antibiotic than to test both of us for all the infections. If I get pregnant again I am to take a baby aspirin daily too.
The doctor's attitude (although he wasn't this blunt) was that I've had the same number of pregnancies as miscarriages so assuming that my labs come back normal (and he assumes they will because I had 3 births), that Ram and I should just keep trying. When I first heard this, I thought this was a terrible "plan" for a pro-life family to have. But Ram doesn't see it that way. He sees it as there is only so much a doctor can do and so much we can afford. The doctor is doing what he can do now to run these lab tests. He is doing something. But there is also much about miscarriage that doctors don't know and can't do anything about. If the lab tests come back with a problem they can treat, they will do something about that. But if the lab tests come back normal, then the best we can do is keep trying.
We are getting a tax refund. I have no idea how much insurance will pay for these tests, so our tax refund may be spent on this. We also received more bills today-one for x-rays of my sprained foot last May and one for my recent ultrasounds for miscarriage. I think it will be a long time before these medical bills are finished.
I did not know where this doctor was located so we all went today. Lamb 3 threw up on the way to the doctor. He had only had milk before he threw up. The Lambs and Ram stayed in the car while I went into the doctor. Then we ate lunch and got some pedialyte at Walmart (which was a pain because they were renovating the Walmart and nothing was in the right place) and came home. Lamb 3 is much better and he took a long nap this afternoon. We'll try to encourage him to drink the pedialyte and liquids. I'm waiting for my turn to get the flu now...
I was very hopeful about this doctor appointment. It was clear to me that I am still to do baby steps. Step 1: Get these labs done on Monday. Step 2: Wait several weeks for the labs to come back and for the doctor to write me a letter about the results. Step 3: Try not to worry about step 1 and 2 while I'm waiting. Step 4: I can't do step 4 until step 1 and 2 are done, so don't worry about it yet.

Taxes

I have to get all our information together, but then we send our taxes to a wonderful tax preparer that specializes in church workers in Fort Wayne, IN. We could probably do them ourselves to save money, but it is nice to send them to her and get them done. While I was gathering receipts I realized, there is much in these receipts that tells about our family. Here's some of what I noticed/remembered about 2009 for our family when I got the tax information together.

Medical: *We drove 2236 miles to doctors and dentists.
*Our portion of the copayments and other payments after deductibles was $1884.22.
*Lamb 1 had his hearing tested in January 2009. After several years of borderline not being able to hear the low registers of sounds, he passed the tests completely this time!
*Ewe sprained her foot in May.
*In June, the Lambs got a rash right before our vacation. We just had to wait for the rash to go away. They were grouchy the whole drive to CO. Ewe's poor parents had to put up with this.
*Lamb 2 had to go to the ER in August when he got a snail shell stuck in his nose.
*We had a miscarriage in September.
*Ewe had a sinus infection in September.
*Lamb 2 had a seizure when we had the regular flu in November. Sometimes children get seizures when they are ill. Dr. was not worried about this one time event even though it scared Ewe!
*Ewe had an ear infection and was sick with the regular flu in November.
*Ewe got her finger stuck in the garage door in December.
*Lamb 2 had his hearing tested in December and passed the tests.
*Even with all this, we were pretty healthy in 2009. We try to go to the chiropractor once a month, but we rarely go to the doctor besides well-child checkups and the injuries I mentioned.

Ram as a pastor: *Ram did 8 funerals in 2009.
*Ram drove 11214 miles for church. This does not include going to conferences. This is just visiting members, going to church services, and going to meetings.
*Ram got a new cell phone in 2009.
*Ram went to a few conferences in MN by himself. We all went along to WI for a retreat and we were able to attend the Divine Service one night at CCA even though we weren't able to stay for CCA this year. This was the first year that Ram did so little for conferences-he didn't go to Symposium in Fort Wayne or stay for CCA. It was also the first year that we didn't go along to any of the conferences in MN.

Our home: *Lamb 2 moved out of the crib onto a mattress on the floor in 2009.
*Rams parents brought us their old kitchen table in March.
*We gave up TV in January 2009.

I think it would be interesting to blog what you can see about our family from our taxes each year!

20th week of school report

Emotionally I was a wreck last week, especially at the beginning of the week. It helped me to have school daily and then set the Lambs free to play the rest of the day. We had school every day last week except for Tuesday. On Tuesday I went to the doctor and our babysitter came along with her mom and brother that is a few weeks older than Lamb 3. The Lambs enjoyed their morning of play. When I got home from the Dr. her mom and I sat around and chatted for a long time. I am so thankful for this family and the help they gave me while Ram was gone last week. ECFE was canceled because of the weather. We didn't do a lot of extras, just the basics of school while Ram was gone. Here's what we accomplished last week:
Math: Finished lesson 12 in MUS and began lesson 13. These are really easy lessons for Lamb 1 and if we hadn't had all the other stuff going on last week, I would have asked him to do more than one worksheet a day.
Reading: We recently began volume 3 of My Book House. So far the stories are longer and don't have my interest yet and definitely are too long for Lamb 2, sometimes too long for Lamb 1. We keep plugging along a little each day, but we don't have the joy that we had with volume 1 and 2. I'm going to attempt to keep with it until we finish volume 3 and then take a break for awhile from My Book House. We did volume 1 twice and volume 2 once. Finished reading Who Owns the Sun? We just read it several times and discussed it, didn't do any FIAR activities with it. I'm starting to run out of FIAR books that we own so I guess it's time to go to the library soon for this. We are still memorizing Bed in Summer by R. L. Stevenson.
Phonics: Lamb 1 continues to do well in Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading.
Religion: I finally got out the next set of posters, but we didn't actually read any of them. Hopefully now that they are out we will get to that this week! We also reviewed the commandments some more. After several weeks church canceled because of weather, we finally had Sunday School today so we have a new Bible verse to memorize now.
Latin: Continue to review in Prima Latina.
Music: We finished learning the names of the musical instruments in the first book that we used. I am amazed that both Lamb 1 and 2 know almost all of the names of the instruments when they see the photo of the instrument. I didn't know the names of some of those instruments until I was in high school band! Next we plan to listen to music from each musical instrument. Lamb 1 wants to ask for some of the musical instruments for his birthday. We own a triangle, recorder, drums, tambourines, maracas, etc. I'm not sure how many more instruments are sold for children. He really wants a cabaca. I guess I'll be searching for one of those the next few weeks! Each new instrument that we learned-the Lambs are typical boys and always asked how LOUD the instrument we were learning was!
We didn't get to much art or science or history to talk about here.
Handwriting: Lamb 2 continues on his worksheets from http://www.donnayoung.org/ and he does a little better every day. Lamb 1 continued to review writing the whole alphabet correctly. I'm thinking about what to do with Lamb 1 next, he still needs review and does not make all his letters correctly. We have been through the entire alphabet and numbers working one letter or number a day-we did this twice. I think we need to do this several more times. I'm trying to figure out how to make it more fun than just the daily basic handwriting sheet.

I also cleaned our guest room to make room for my sister who is coming to visit in a few weeks. We had a lot of stuff ready to be given away piled up in there that I organized. Now I'm waiting for my parents to come visit and get a lot of this stuff for the Seminary and other places. I washed all the sheets and blankets and actually dusted and vacuumed too. I began getting everything together to send to our tax preparer. I hope to finish my work on taxes and send it to her this week.

Buying a new car

I really do plan to post about our new car that we bought in February soon-I just keep getting other ideas for blog posts AND I haven't taken a photo of Ram with the car yet either!

We found it was cheaper to buy a new car with the deals than to buy a used car. Ram also read in the April 5 Sunday paper that you can deduct the state and local and excise sales tax off of 2009 returns. You can take this deduction whether or not you itemize deductions. The deduction applies to vehicles manufactured both here and abroad. This deduction is limited for taxes paid on up to $49,500 of the purchase price (no problem, we didn't even pay 1/2 that). Plus the amount of the deduction has to do with your income (again, no problem, Ram doesn't even make close to the limit). The vehicle must be purchased after February 16 and before December 31, 2009. Guess when we bought our car? February 20! Ram's dad also purchased a new car in March. These qualifications may rule out many buyers, but it will help us and be a significant savings.

We are thankful to Ram's parents for helping us to buy a new car. We are also thankful that we bought it at just the right time to take this deduction!