a post of posts

ahhh! I've been meaning to post for weeks, but can never seem to find the time. I've been back at work full time for two weeks, Mr. Savvy has been home with Baby (although he's grown so much it seems weird to me to call him Baby). Life's been chaotic, but hopefully things will be settling down. I didn't refinance our house, like I posted a couple months ago. We would have had to bring money to the closing, and I wasn't comfortable with that considering our 0% credit card debt, as well as Mr. Savvy's employment status (he's hopefully back to work on Monday after many, many delays with his employer), and I was just working part time. I did get our taxes mailed off... we are getting a very large refund. We increased our withholdings last year from 1 to 5 with the anticipation of Baby Savvy and the acquisition of the apartment building, but we are still getting almost $6,000 back. When people talk about the tax benefits of owning rental property they aren't joking, it worked out very well for us this year. Baby Savvy is wonderful. He just had his six month appointment, and he weighs 16 lbs and 10.2 ounces and is 27 1/2 inches long. We were going to start vaccinating him at six months, but we are going to wait one more month before we begin. He had an ear infection (which we didn't know about until the appointment) and we want to make sure he is completely healthy before he gets any shots. He started solids the day he turned six months by snatching a small piece of roast chicken from Mr. Savvy... we took that as his way of telling us he's ready to eat. Chicken is so far his favorite food and the only thing that he eats consistently. I didn't update our net worth last month. I checked it on Yodlee and it was not good. We had about $1,000 in unanticipated expenses, combined with my 80% pay and Mr. Savvy's unemployment led to dips in just about every category except real estate equity. I'll give us another month to hope that it evens out... I have acquired a new hobby, which contributed more than I'm willing to admit to last month's poor net worth performance. I started knitting. I took a class in February and I was instantly addicted. So far I've finished four items, and I have two more in progress. It isn't cheap to start-up, but I get a lot of enjoyment for the money. It didn't take long to build up a nice stash of beautiful wool yarn either. I hope everyone else is well. I don't check my blog roll often enough and probably haven't read it thoroughly in months.