Summertime!

As I sit at my dining room table and (ahem) enjoy....the blizzard-like conditions descending on my city, I've decided that it's time to revisit the summer! I never did get the last of my Summer of Fun photo albums posted (I'm sure you've been impatiently hanging on that cliff wondering when the rest would come ;-)

Part of the problem was that our camera's both bit the dust and I had to start taking pics with my phone. Near the end of the summer I discovered that LG was no longer supporting the program I had been using to transfer my photos from phone to computer. I had to get a micro-sd card and then manually transfer all the photos from the phone memory to the sd card....one...by....one. Do you know how many photos I took last summer!?!!?

It became one of those projects I was never getting around to...until last night. So, finally, here they are!

This was a previously unplanned trip that our good friends Jenn and Troy invited us to on the spur of the moment. They have passes to all the parks around here and had a bonus of a day long canoe rental. So we headed out to Valens and enjoyed an afternoon paddling around the water.....

One of our originally planned trips was to the Hamilton Children's Museum and then to the Gage Park splash pad right next to it. Unfortunately we took our sweet time that day and didn't get out to the Museum until about 2:30 or 2:45. When we went to the front desk, we were sadly informed that they were only open until 3pm. So the kids only got about 15 minutes around the museum, but the bonus was that we didn't have to pay. We figured we'd come back another day, but we never did. They still liked it though and we snapped lots of pictures.

Then over to the splash pad which is alway a hit with my kids. I love a splash pad because it's so fun for them, and I don't have to get my suit on! (I never thought I'd be one of those mummies).

I'm pretty sure it was after Gage Park that we hopped on the QE and headed over to the beach. The kids had been whining about supper and a real water feature, so we got some supper at Hutch's and sat on a blanket on the beach to eat it. I love to go down to the beach and even with sand kicked on my food, spilled drinks because there was no hard place to set them down on, and James rapidly losing his cool because of all this....I still have a lovely peaceful feeling when I think of that trip.

And....I think this is the last one....on Labour Day weekend, we took our last Summer of fun trip. We went to Spencer Gorge. It was a half nice and half sucky trip. First of all, there was plenty-o-whining going on with the amount of hiking that it required. If the place hadn't been packed out, I very likely would have left Verity standing in the middle of one of the paths, shrieking her head off because "her legs hurt". We borrowed a hiking back-pack and James carried Afton in it...which she was not completely thrilled with. So that was a stressor. I had never been here before; I only picked it because of the pictures and description on the website, so I didn't realize that there was a tremendously steep, somewhat rickety, crumbling away in places stairway to get from the top where the falls start, down to the bottom where you'd get the amazing view. Jairus had a bit of a hard time with that climb and I have to admit, I was pretty nervous trying to coax them all down it.

And then came the event that Verity talks about even to this very day (this morning when she put the same Dora boots on she was wearing that day). We had gotten down to the bottom and were climbing around on the rocks trying to get closer to the waterfall. Like I said, the place was crawling with vacationers like ourselves. I left James and the kids on one large rock and hopped over a few until I was nearly in the middle of the creek that the falls drain into. It was a great view to get a picture of. Well, Verity, ever the brave and daring one, followed me before we could stop her. And to tell you the truth, I wasn't too worried because she's such a climber and very sure footed. Until she tried to hop one rock farther than me...and it was a slippery one. She fell hard and slipped right into the water. A number of people saw, and many more heard her yell. I had many eyes on me as I quickly grabbed her arm and hoisted her up with me....but not before I'm sure many of them had decided I was indeed an irresponsible mummy to have brought my wee little girl way out onto these rocks. Verity was pretty upset, a little bumped and bruised, but her pride was surprisingly the most damaged. She was mighty embarrassed at what had happened.

Anyways, in some ways it was still a nice trip. The park and falls are quite beautiful and I made some mental plans to come back on a day when there might not be so many throngs of people about. I think we stopped for ice cream on the way home and that covered a multitude of complaints. :-)

Nostalgic

Sometimes I wonder if too much wandering down memory lane can be a not-so-good thing.

I think there are alot of things I'm quite nostalgic about. As you can see, I've changed my template again. I held the same one for quite a long time and really liked it, but then started having technical difficulties with it. I tried to get the designer, Isnaini, to help me, but I didn't hear back from him after numerous tries. So with great sadness, I found another--the red one. I liked it...but it didn't hit me the way my old one did. And for some reason, the last couple days, I've been surfing around looking at others. I found a completely beautiful one here but when I went to download it, I had to jump through hoops to get it for free. I started jumping, but was suddenly exasperated and decided not to. I kept looking here and found many really good ones, but with over 160 pages to look at, I cut things short.

This one's nice. Not sure if it's hitting me either though. I'm still kind of yearning for my beautiful girl template, but strangely when I looked back on Isnaini's site and saw it (The Future)....I didn't try downloading it again.

Timotei. There's another random thing I'm nostalgic for. I used Timotei shampoo for years, much of high school....well, the end of high school that is. Then they stopped making it. I have yet to find another shampoo that I like nearly as well as Timotei. I think it's a girl thing. Or a scent thing.

I don't know if everyone is like this, but my nose has this amazing memory. I can remember smells from way back, but it's not like I can conjure the scent up again....it's more the way I felt when I smelt it. If I smell Safari cologne (I think it's Safari), I can immediately remember the nervous/excited way I felt when I sang with an opera and the maestro kept kissing me on both sides of my face whenever he saw me (he was from Europe). There's a couple other colognes that bring back memories; Drakar, polo and some blue sailboat stuff.

Music does a similar thing. The soundtrack to Stealing Home, a movie I've never seen, is a huge memory-unearther for me. Peter Cetera/Chicago. Sting. Phil Collins. Some wacky song about a pencil case.

I was reading some old journals earlier this week--maybe that's what started all this. Sometimes it's completely amazing to see stuff I wrote when I was 17--even hopes for having a family and career--and compare it to now. Sometimes the stuff I wrote was quite sweet. Sometimes it was really dorky.

And sometimes it's rather heartbreaking.

I have journals of each of my kids through their pregnancies and births and some after as well. I have journals of highschool plays and university classes, boyfriends and break-ups, engagements (....ok, just one of those). I have a journal of all my wedding plans. I have a journal with autographs of most of my camp co-workers from each year. I have journals that talk about my siblings, my parents, my friends, my failures, my dreams and expectations.

I was going to say that I don't really journal anymore, but then I realized I just got high-tech about it. You're reading it! Although, it's not quite the same. It might seem that I tell the whole world some rather in depth details about my life, [some say] but...really? You really think?

Uh-uh. Sorry if that's disappointing.

There are just some things you don't want to hear about.

The Frustrations of Life

It seems like the older I get, the more things I run across in life that just seem completely frustrating. Why is that?

Let's talk about events. I am involved in a few organizations/activities/whatever that have required me to be a part of the planning or execution of various events. My involvement has included pretty much everything from advertising all the way through to sweeping the floor after it was all done.

Tell me, when you see an event advertised, what makes you want to attend it?

• It looks like fun?
• It's cheap?
• It's at a time you are available?
• It's for a cause you feel strongly about?
• Someone personally invited you and you felt good about that? You knew others were going that you know?
• You knew the organizers and felt obligated?

That's just a few reasons that come to mind. Likewise, what reasons cause you to decide not to go?

• It looks cheesy.
• It's too expensive.
• You're busy that night.
• The reason for the event doesn't turn your crank.
• You didn't know anyone else going to it.

I've never really thought of myself as a negative person. But...maybe I'm getting that way. I say this because throughout my involvement with these various events, I would often turn the tables and put myself in the shoes of the people we were trying to reach in order to advertise most effectively. And often my thoughts would be..."Would I go to this if I got an email about it? Would I be a part of this if I got a Facebook invite? Would I just plain go to this if I wasn't part of the leadership of it?".

And often my answer is no. And I think to myself, "Why do I feel this way? What would change that?".

Well, all the reasons I listed above. If I was available. If it wasn't too expensive. (Although these days my automatic answer to any 'extras' is usually no). If I knew I could get someone to watch my kids, if that was necessary. If it was a cause I felt strongly about. If someone personally invited me---I think that's a huge one. I can think of specific times that I've not planned to attend something, and then did when I was personally invited. That nice warm feeling that someone likes me and wants to see me at the event was a huge motivation. I think that's a better way to get people out to an event than any amount of glossy advertising.

But I digress. My point is the frustration. Recently, I was doing some advertising for an event through Facebook. Now, it's my understanding that generally there's a "rule" of 10%. Roughly 10% return on your investment. So, back when I was doing Creative Memories, they'd say that for every 10 people you asked to host a get-together, you'd get one yes. Pretty depressing.

Well, I invited about 250 people through Facebook. In the end, this resulted in about half the people turning it down, a little less than half not even responding and about 4 people rsvping positively.

But maybe that's what you can expect from free advertising? I'd say my success rate through email was about the same.

My point here is....why do we do these? Why do we even bother to create events, fundraisers, fun get-togethers when it seems like most people are just too busy? Time and time again, this is another extremely common reason for not being a part of something. We all just have so many other things we're involved in that someone asking us to give another evening out or whatever is just too much. And so, as an organizer, it's extremely frustrating...and depressing. And it makes you wonder why you're doing any of it to begin with. Why bother putting yourself through that?

Another frustration of life has become email and/or internet based communication.

For the most part, we have all become very technologically based when it comes to our communication. Sure, the old fashioned phone is still up there, but email, texting, facebook messaging, msning, going to a website for info and tweeting have become huge. But how effective is it really?

We're starting to see reports and studies coming out that talk about how much email we're all getting--and how much spam. I just discovered that I had over 1000 unread emails in some folder of Microsoft Outlook. Suddenly my email wasn't working and I was getting some 'capacity reached' message. Couldn't figure it out and then James helped me find this folder that I'd never noticed. It's RSS feeds from msnbc. I have NO idea how it got there....NO idea how I got signed up to receive them.....and NO interest in getting it at all. Over a thousand!!

I only go on Facebook about once a week---just too much info there for my brain to handle. I have a Tweet page (is that what you call it?) but I'm never on it, only made about half a dozen posts to it.

And I myself have a number of blogs and websites that I try to keep updated, especially the ones that are integral to the communication in some of my jobs. Time and time again though, I am terribly frustrated to find that people are:

• Not reading my emails
• Not reading my blog/website posts
• Not thoroughly reading either of the above and only understanding half of what is going on.

And so, I again try to put myself in their shoes. Why is it so difficult for some people to make the best use of these forms of communication?

• They're too busy--they just don't think of it.
• They read the stuff and then forget about it.
• They don't have time to read thoroughly.
• They don't know/understand how to access the info--maybe their computer is dated or throwing up some firewall--this is a reason I've been given before.

And so I'm constantly wondering--is this really working? Is this really effective? Am I annoying the heck out of people?

Related to this is another phenomenon of the 21st century that I've been butting heads with.

Privacy.

I find it intensely frustrating that I see us as a society slowly turning so far inward that someday we'll surely be to the point of dressing all our children in head to toe veils and not allowing them outside the house.

Ok, maybe I'm going overboard.

But, lets take the example of posting pictures on the internet. Now, you can obviously see that I have no problem with that. I'm sure alot of people think I'm nuts that I don't have a problem with that, but really, I'm just not seeing it.

Everywhere I go, people see my face. I am not of some religion that requires me to cover up, so I am fully visible.

• At school
• At church
• At work
• At the grocery store
• Through the front window of my house, on which there is no curtain
• On TV when my choir concerts are taped
• Driving on the highway
• Walking in my neighbourhood
• I could go on, ad nauseum!

So please, enlighten my poor dull brain, what is the sudden and tremendous difference if someone was to take my picture?!

I'm suddenly not moving. Ok......

And if said picture was then (gasp) put on a website or blog or something, what has now become the difference?

Maybe a few more people would see it? Yes, yes, I do realize that www stands for WORLD WIDE WEB. But really, who is looking at this or the other blogs/websites I upkeep? Perhaps a few other people might stumble across it, but mostly, it's people that know me, people that come visiting from another blog or facebook. People I've invited to come see, people who are a part of my organizations. Friends. Family.

And so what if someone who doesn't know me, and I don't know them, sees my picture?

SO WHAT!?

Why is my face worthy of such privacy? No one's going to make any money off of it by selling it to People magazine. My children are not the offspring of two famous movie stars that I feel they needed to be shielded from papparazzi.

The whole issue of pedophiles has been mentioned to me. Maybe I'm REALLY naive but I'm just not figuring that one out. So some pedophile is scanning the internet and sees some picture of my four year old blowing out her birthday candles. How exactly is that endangering my kid? Really now, are the chances that this creep would read my entire blog and put together clues and figure out where I live and come kidnap my daughter and molest her REALLY all the more than if I didn't put her picture on my blog? I have a sneaky suspicion that if some statistician worked up some numbers, we'd find similar results as the chances of being killed in Afghanistan. (Higher if you are walking in downtown Toronto--especially these days). Or being killed by a handgun (greater chance of drowning in a backyard pool). Or dying in an airplane crash (greater chance driving on the 401). What do these have in common? People more likely believe the first of each example. Because they're scarier sounding.

I suppose some would say that ANY chance of that occurring is enough to keep their children's pictures off the internet. I say that in 10 years time we'll be living in a veil covered bubble if we keep thinking like that.

We are PEOPLE.

We need to CONNECT with other PEOPLE.

This is why we are LIVING on this EARTH.

And my kids are gorgeous. Look at them all you want.

;-)

Me

Summer, 2009

April, 2008

April, 2008

It's a PD day

I do enjoy PD days. It's so nice not to have to rush around and go out in the cold to take Jairus to school. The girls thinks it's a rip that they don't get a pd day too.

I've wanted to update for a while. I've composed innumerable blog posts in my head over the last few months, but never feel I have the time to sit down and write them out. And I don't really now, either. The girls are in the schoolroom, which is a disgusting mess. It's a perpetual problem. Jairus is in the bath, probably quite prunish by now, so I need to go find him some undies. He seems to have regressed in his toilet training over the last week or two and I can't keep up. I'm still in pj's and robe...so...I'm just stopping by quickly here to post this pic my brother sent me. Jenn posted many of these shots on her blog, so I'm sure they won't mind me putting it up here.

Mama bear is proud

I'll warn you right now, this is going to be a "my little girl is such a great kid" kind of post. :-)

We just finished Operation Christmas Child at church. As a family, we've done OCC (you know, those shoeboxes filled with goodies) for a number of years. In Novembers past, I've gathered the kids around my computer and showed them the videos that can be seen on the Samaritans Purse website. We would head over to Zellers and the dollar store to fill up shoeboxes with all manner of exciting things (exciting, because we knew they would be going to some little one who likely owned nothing like any of our bounty). I was always really pleased with the effect on my kids and felt it was building a great sense of compassion and sacrifice in them. It's hard for 2 and 3 year olds to pick things out of a store and not get to keep them!

Well, last year and this, mom and I brought OCC to the MountainKids. I won't get into how it went here and now, but instead I wanted to tell you about something Honour did.

2 or 3 weekends ago, we were over at my parents house on a Sunday afternoon, a common ritual. Sometime in the afternoon, Honour started talking about a ballet show she wanted to put on for all of us. This is also a common ritual in our family, although she'd never done it at my moms, in front of all the family.
So she schemed and planned all afternoon and once in a while I heard rumblings that she was going to be asking us all to pay to see the show. I didn't give this alot of attention--I'm usually trying to catch up on MountainKids planning on Sunday afternoons.

Sure enough, after supper she finagled the menfolk to move the furniture in the living room aside and tada! Her dance floor was ready. As everyone came in and found a place to sit, she tripped about the room, flashing her pearlies and holding out her hand for "donations". She asked for a minimum of a dime. Of course everyone dug deep and acquiesced.

And then, as I tootled some made-up tune (at her request), she waltzed about the room and performed, to the best of her memory, some of what she learned at a 10 week ballet class over a year ago. She was, of course, adorable.

After a grand total of 4 minutes, the show was done and we all clapped enthusiastically. When she had me help her count her proceeds, I was surprised that she had raised nearly 2$.

It was then that she told me that "Now she had enough to buy something for the kids who only get one egg for breakfast!". I was SO touched and pleased at this. I had been a little concerned at her "hornswaggling" this money off my parents and siblings, but to hear what her little heart had been intending....it just made my heart melt.

You might be wondering what in the world the one egg for breakfast thing is....

A couple months ago, I read this blog about a remarkable young woman who is making a difference in the world in a way most of us only dream of. You can read about her here.

One story she tells is about how she provides breakfast for about 200 needy kids in Uganda--a hard boiled egg. Now, truthfully, she might give them more than just one egg, but one day when I was trying to help my daughters understand how wasteful it was not to finish the food on their plate, I told them about Katie, and these children she provides for. I told them that these poor kids only got 1 egg for breakfast and that was a word picture that really stuck in their heads.

Honour had decided that these kids who only get one egg for breakfast were one and the same as those we were packing shoeboxes for. And who knows, they just might be.

So a few days after the ballet for charity show, I took her and Verity over to the dollar store and she picked out 2 items to go in her OCC box.

I won't pretend she was still single-mindedly committed to buying this stuff for her box...I had to keep her on track a couple times. But in the end, the items were bought, and she was ready to pack them in the shoebox and see them go off to a child who would appreciate them--in the end---more than she.

One of those...maybe-we-are-doing-a-half-decent-parenting-job-after-all moments....

We've been Dave Ramsey-fied

So here's an update on our Mvelopes/Dave Ramsey journey.

It's started quite a while ago really. I think we've just passed the 3 year mark for using Mvelopes. I first talked about it on my blog here and here. I'm still a huge fan of the service. I'm even considering a new offer they're advertising about a life-long membership for a reasonable price. I really do think I'll be using this for a looong time...or at least as long as it would take to spend the same amount yearly as I would in one shot for the lifetime membership.


Crown, where I first learned of Mvelopes through their Money Matters radio show, (it may be called something different--I haven't been able to listen to WDCX for months, ever since some dumb station from Kitchener horned in on their signal) and Dave Ramsey have alot in common. Crown has their Money Map with it's 6 or 7 steps to managing your money; Dave has his Baby Steps. Crown has the Debt Rollover. Dave has his Debt Snowball. The two mesh nicely and rarely does one contradict the other. I also pay attention to Mary Hunt. I read one of her books a few years ago; I think it was the Financially Confident Woman. I was impressed with her story of working her way out of massive credit and consumer debt, but I've been just slightly less impressed with some of her philosophies. Plus I thought when I read it that she was an outspoken Christian, but none of her emails or stuff I read now seems to indicate that at all. Not that I wouldn't listen to her if she wasn't a Christian...good money sense is good money sense no matter where it comes from.

But Dave Ramsey and I just click. I love listening to his show. I love his dry, sarcastic humour and his southern drawl; how he can get away with calling the ladies 'darlin'. I love the simple, straightforward common sense way he has about him. I don't doubt that he understands the ins and outs of real estate, investing, economics and all that, but he 'puts the cookies on the bottom shelf'. I said in one of the previous posts (now a few years ago) that I first read his Total Money Makeover about 5-6 years ago. We were living in Brantford and I think it was part of our big wake-up call that we had been completely botching our finances. I borrowed books from all over and I believe that one came from my parents' shelves.


It was a good book, really liked the ideas and principles. Talked to James about it, read him parts of the book. He agreed and so we decided to go for it. We were going to start the Baby Steps. I think they're fairly well known, so I'll list them here:

1. Save $1000 quickly for an emergency fund.

2. Get out of debt, except for your house, using the Debt Snowball

3. Save a larger emergency fund: 3-6 months of expenses

4. Start contributing to your retirement

5. Start contributing to kids college fund, you if have kids

6. Pay off your house

7. Enjoy and give away your wealth!







This is where we're at!

So back to our first try: It was pretty much a complete bust. A combination of things I think...one was that we didn't follow the steps. We thought we were, but really, we didn't and so it didn't work. We didn't think we could save the $1000 bucks, that seemed unreasonable and unnecessary and so we...shhhh...skipped that one. Number two was that James was with me on it, but he wasn't with me on it. Dave talks about getting mad and zealous about getting rid of your debt--gazelle intensity he calls it. We didn't get that. So it petered out.


Jump ahead to our move to Hamilton and the discovery of Mvelopes. I wouldn't say that Dave Ramsey's material was completely ineffective in our lives. I think alot of the principles and ideas permeated our thoughts and beliefs and slowly we became more mad at our debt and more serious about doing something to get rid of it.


The Mvelopes was a great step. For the first time, we had a way to follow up on our budget and really track where everything was going. It's one thing to sit down and make a budget and say, "OK, we're going to spend 40$ on milk and bread for the next two weeks". But how do you make sure you do that? 5 trips to the variety store later, you've spent more than $40 bucks. But you need the bread and milk, right? It's that follow up step that most people lose out on when they live on a budget. You can get really fastidious and keep every receipt and go back to your budget sheet and subtract each one, keeping a running total. I did that for a while...back when I was still doing everything on paper with a pencil. But Mvelopes makes all that nice and streamlined.

The Mvelopes was working really nicely for us, but it hadn't solved all our problems. The beginning of this year rolled around and I sat down to run some reports (another nice Mvelopes feature) to see how we'd done over the previous year. The most valuable part of this is I can see accurately how much is actually getting spent in each category. We might budget $180 for groceries every two weeks, but what do we really spend? Do we go over and pull from other envelopes, or let the envelope sit in the negative until payday and fill it up with overtime? Then I have a goal to aim for. One of my little money goals is to be able to fill each envelope with the actual amount we spend. It gets awfully tiresome to always be putting the bare minimum into, let's say, the food envelope and than overspending it much of the time because it's simply not enough money to feed my family. Then I might actually get to the point of having money left over in an envelope and be able to 'sweep' it into a savings envelope at the end of the month.


My financial assessment, as it usually is, was not pretty. We were just consistently overspending, relying on a cushion in the account to take the fall. Well, the cushion had sprung a leak and now it was flat and useless. Gone, in fact.

I actually had to reset the Mvelopes system. We had so many negatives that it was like being in the middle of an endless maze. It was a depressing and pride-busting day.


We decided that we needed to do something more. We needed more help, more information....more something. So I started looking at Dave Ramseys material again on his website. His Financial Peace University looked like just what we needed.


I'll boil this down so as not to make this too long (too late!). We found an FPU class in the area and started attending. It was awesome. It totally kickstarted us on the path to our financial hopes. Within a month we had our 'baby' emergency fund. I really think that the only way we were able to do it was using the Mvelopes. Let me expand a little.

Have you ever had a time where you knew you'd be saving money on something in particular? Or maybe some extra money came in for something. For instance, when we first read DR, we decided that instead of James getting a second job, we were going to take all his overtime and put that towards the Baby Steps. Every pay, I saw that overtime come in but do you think it actually went towards the Steps? No way. It frittered away into nothing.


With using Mvelopes, we were able to see any extra money in black and white, and immediately put it towards our goal. When the gas bill arrived, $26 less than the usual equal payment amount (we're on equal installments for all our bills that offer it), that $26 went right into the Emergency Fund envelope and then transferred to our ING account soon after. I regularly sat down and went through the envelopes, scraping off amounts as few as 4 cents, transferring it to the EF envelope. The night we got to $1000, we celebrated with a bottle of sparkling juice that we had bought for Valentines day and not used. It was Jamie's birthday too! It was such an amazing feeling. We'd never saved that much money in our whole lives.


Onward to Step 2. I guess it wouldn't be kosher to say how much we were in debt. But I'll say that we had about 3 debts that were all around the same size. And they seemed pretty big to us. I knew it was going to take us quite a bit longer than one month to get it taken care of, snowball or not.

Just in case you're not familiar with the Snowball concept, here's a quick lesson: You list all your debts from smallest to largest. Include in this list who it's to, what your monthly payment is, what your interest rate is and the total amount owed. Since this is Baby Step #2, you're likely already in search-under-the-couch-cushions-for-extra-money mode, so keep that up and start applying ANY extra money towards debt #1. Keep paying the minimums on all the rest. Do crazy things like work extra jobs delivering pizzas or something to get extra money--remember, it's only for a short time. As Dave says constantly, Live like no one else....so that later you can live like no one else. Then when you've got debt #1 paid off (celebrate!) and move on to #2, applying the minimum from #1 to #2...and keep scraping and delivering those pies.

This is again where the Mvelopes were indispensable. This is again, where we failed when we tried the first time. Because we didn't have a plan for how each household paycheque was used, there was no way to put our hands on that minimum from debt #1 in a consistent way. With Mvelopes, when a paycheque comes in, a 'profile' is applied to it: a list of all the financial obligations that we've pre-determined will always come out of it. For instance, my paycheque from one of my choirs pays for:
Phone bill
Babysitter
Savings
Gas bill
Some groceries

In the Mvelopes program, the deposit from this paycheque comes through automatically (Mvelopes connects with your bank and downloads all your recent transactions). I click on it and drag it to the Income Cash Pool (the screen where you decide what envelopes it will be dispersed to). I found it easiest to use their profiling option which with one click, fills in the amounts for me.
So when Debt#1 got paid off, when I clicked on 'profile', however much we were paying towards it was filled in....but now it didn't need to be there! I could very happily delete that box and clearly see from my totals at the bottom of the screen that we now had $X to apply to somewhere else. So I put it in the envelope for Debt #2. Small victory...but felt great.

Since the spring when we finished FPU, we were able, through the blessings and grace of God, to finish Baby Step #2, and as you can see from my ticker, get about halfway through step #3. It's an amazing feeling! Especially when I think back to the frustration and despondency of our first attempt 5-6 years ago. I never thought we'd make it this far!---and maybe that was part of the problem.

So that's my novel..er, um, update. I hope maybe there was something informative or inspiring for you!