Spending Money

For the record, I asked Pig what on earth I could write about that I could finish writing in less than twenty minutes so I could go crawl into bed. His response was, "Spending money? I dunno." Thank you, Pig, for coming up with a topic I could gladly blather about endlessly. That kind of negates the whole finish-in-twenty-minutes thing, but at least it gives me something about which I am an expert.

Technically, my husband had a very good reason for his response. All I have been doing these past few days is spending money. To be fair, it was not my fault the car needed some fairly major work done on it. That covered about half the money I have spent in recent history. The rest of it is a combination of groceries and Christmas presents.

Before you start scolding me for purchasing Christmas presents before Thanksgiving, let me just say that it's not my fault. I am apparently genetically predisposed to spending far too much time shopping for gifts for other people. My mother had the same gene. Either that or she taught me well. Regardless, I am happiest at this time of the year when I am able to sneak out, shop, and then sneak items into the house without the kidlets somehow discovering what I am doing.

This year, I am also feeling the reprieve of suddenly having the house off the market. This means that I do not feel the same level of stress about trying to buy and fit items in my rather small house. Pig thoughtfully suggested that I could carry a bunch of larger Christmas presents into the house through our Bilco doors, and I considered that to be a challenge to come up with oodles of larger items in order to do just that.  This also let me be fairly sneaky about shopping while the kidlets were home for the weekend. I brought most of my purchases into the basement through those open doors, then went in the kitchen door as normal while carrying one small bag. Not a child was any wiser this way.

Text messages are great for this, too. I simply sent Pig a message before I started my expensively-fixed car in the store's parking lot, told him when I should be home, and he opened the Bilco doors for me just as I pulled in the driveway. Now all I have to do is remember not to let the kidlets go down to our basement for any reason until I find a better place to stash my loot.

I also ordered a few things online over the past few days, mostly for the kidlets, and I am hoping and praying those packages arrive while they are at school and not at home. My sneaky offspring have tried looking under my bedroom door when I bring a delivered package to my room to open it up. Unfortunately, there had been carpeting down in this house when we purchased it, so there is quite a gap between the bottom of doors and our nice wood floors now. This makes peeking a little too easy for them to attempt, and forces me to make dire threats when I catch them in the act. Thankfully, the worst offender is the six-year-old who is still unable to s-p-e-l-l if she only catches words on the boxes instead of seeing any pictures.

So there's my twenty minutes of rambling about spending money. I do have one more thing to add, however. I really, really enjoyed spending half of that money. The car repairs were not fun, but the Christmas purchases were a blast. Hopefully, I can keep that happy feeling even when the credit card bills come due. If not, I'll just blame it all on the car.