I'm spending my Saturday night preparing for a spontaneous trip to Michigan! We talked about going to see our family during my maternity leave and made the decision late Thursday night. We're leaving in the late afternoon Monday and will drive into the night, stay in a hotel (I'll post if we get our favorite hotel in Kentucky for $25 on priceline) and finish the trip Tuesday morning.

Today is the last day of February and Baby #2 is 1 month old! Hubby did a photo shoot this afternoon and I'm planning on ordering about 25 birth announcements from walmart.com (33-cents each) since that costs less than me handmaking them.

And since March begins tomorrow (where is 2009 going??!!), here are some goals for the month:
1. Send bonus check to debt.
2. Find $50 in snowflakes this month to send to debt.
3. Continue my good progress on Weight Watchers and lose 5 additional pounds.
4. Exercise consistently at least 3 days per week.

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February accomplishments:
- We accumulated $73 in snowflakes for debt
- To date we have paid off 27% of our total debt

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To remind us to be intense on paying off our debt I was silly and created a paper chain. I wrote each month from February 2009-March 2011 on the links and strung it up on the refrigerator. I look forward to watching that chain shrink!! If we pay things off faster I'll remove links from the pay off end and on the last day of each month I'll remove that month's link - today I ripped of February 2009!

The cool thing is that as we've had company at our house they ask about the chain and it gives us an opportunity to explain what we're doing. People really understand when we tell them how many rings would be up there if we weren't so aggressive to keep it to those 24 months we're up against.

My husband and I have been talking about some of the "value add" things we can be doing while I'm on maternity leave. Things with baby #2 have been awesome and I love feeling productive, so I was excited to brainstorm some of these ideas together.

Tonight I got a good start on one of these tasks. My husband created an excrypted memory stick that we'll keep locked up in our safe - I'm adding all of the account log-in information for our finances, insurance, etc so that my husband will have all of this at his fingertips should anything happen to me. He knows most of them, but having everything in one place will be good insurance in the event that we should ever need it.

I know it can be scary or just plain dumb to write this stuff down but I feel good about the encryption software and our personal safe - consider doing this for yourself as well. You never know when you might need this information.

Up next - making a photocopy of everything in my wallet & stashing that away in the safe as well. In the event my wallet is stolen all contact #s and account numbers are compiled so things can be canceled quickly and I don't feel the stress of trying to remember what was in my wallet.

Anyone have any suggestions for what else should be on my list? Am I going about this the right way or are their other options for how to accomplish these tasks securely?

Thanks!

Wow! It's been a few weeks (ok, almost 2 months!) - I had my baby 3 weeks ago, so that's been keeping me busy and away, but I'm back.

I've updated the sidebars to show our latest progress. Snowflaking hasn't been going as well as it did in December, but we're going to get refocused there.

We've also been looking at minivans over the last week and a half - we have all the money saved up for that, just looking for the right car for us.

I plan to be back on here more regularly with some more interesting things to share. I also anticipate being able to send our giant debt snowball (we've accumulated it since December, just waiting to make sure baby's arrival wasn't going to require those funds in addition to what we'd already allocated for that) AND my bonus to our debts. That will be a great day!

I also need to add a weight loss ticker - I'm doing Weight Watchers on my own for now (rejoining when I go back to work at the end of March)...I have a ways to go

I did our taxes 2 weeks ago so that's out of the way. Also, I am so thankful that I had a really good review at my job before I went on maternity leave and I will be getting both a good raise and a bonus this year - something we can't take for granted.

Gee, this post is everywhere!