Today was a busy day … a lot of work, and also a lot of math.

I knew that this day would come eventually, but it doesn’t make the numbers any easier to crunch as we try to figure out how Sara can cut back on her hours at work to spend more time at home raising the kids once the twins finally come home. I’ve got to imagine that it would be hard for just about any dual-income household to scale back to only having one, or in our case roughly 1.3 jobs from the previous 2…

A big part of the problem is that our budget has honestly been lacking wiggle room for a while … at least since Sara went on short term disability this summer when the pregnancy started getting more complicated. So we really haven’t been able to save up or pay down debts as much as we were hoping to and now that we’re considering taking that 60% that she’s been getting all summer and then cutting it again?!

Woof. My spreadsheets hurt from calculating out so many different scenarios!

Of course, it doesn’t help that the other day I randomly looked at a couple of incredible houses online and it got my gears turning around that whole topic again … which apparently gets more complicated when you start to consider the impact that moving can have on your kids. 🙁

You figure Christopher is 2.5 years old right now and could start VPK as early as next spring if he qualifies … which puts the kid only three years away from the first grade … and honestly at the rate we’re going, that’s the absolute earliest that I can see us moving into a bigger house at this point just because we still need to pay off debts and start saving up for a down payment and all, not to mention that whole thing about a reduced income!

We both really don’t want the kids to have to switch schools and miss any friends and familiarities that they’ve built up along the way, and right now it’s hard to say for certain that we wouldn’t still stay in the area and just find a bigger place. We love the community where we live, save for its distance from Tampa itself, and its biggest restriction is lot size because we’re really looking for our next home to be someplace where we can really spread out and spend the rest of our days, as it were…

So anyways, that’s been on the mind just a little bit as well, though the main focus right now is just crunching numbers until we can get Sara home more often than not because there is no way in hell that we can keep playing the you work nights, I work days, and we’ll hand off the kid somewhere in the middle-game with three little denizens running amok both day and night!!!

Right now I’m reluctantly confident that we can make it work between some belt tightening, some higher tax withholdings, and a minimal amount of my having to sell my body on the streets, so we shall see. 😉