12-14 months

January

No recent developments on where the Dollahite family is headed for the next 4 years yet. We're still just waiting and praying! We'll keep you posted though.

Due to the cries of the masses (I heart you Shanny), here are a couple pics of our little miss during this cold month of January. She now loves to ride on her little pony, make it sing & talk, and absolutely loves wearing her hat.

For some reason or another, she can't handle wearing a headband or bow though and generally has this type of grimace on her face just before ripping it off and looking at it as though it had attached her head.

She is learning tons of new things, like saying Annaliese (Anna, although it is sometimes NaNa - which also can mean Banana or Nannie), roaring like a lion (also sounds like "naaaaa" and not very ferocious), giving mom & dad kisses on the lips or eskimo kisses (so precious!). She also can kind of tell the difference between yes and no, as shown by her "Yes Yes No No" book where she can nod yes and say No No repeatedly. She is getting better about learning not to throw her food and generally hands it back to me if she doesn't want it, which I do appreciate. She has been having fun with little friends at the nursery or play dates and seems to be dropping her morning nap *sigh*. Alas, we are having a ball with this sweet toddler girl.

Although I technically wouldn't say that I have a New Year's Resolution, I am going to try to be a lot better about keeping track of our finances from now on. And what I've been using is mint.com. It is great because of so many things:

1. It is free.
2. It keeps track of all of your accounts (mortgage, CDs, 401K, IRA, checking, savings etc. ALL in ONE place - which is great if you're like us and have accounts at a multitude of different places unfortunately.
3. It tells you places that you can save, such as higher rate savings accounts - a feature that I just made use of yesterday. (This is how they make their money, by the way, simply by referring you to save $$ by switching to another account.)
4. The budget tools are AWESOME. They keep track of all expenditures without you having to do anything other than verify the category that it selected (unless you split things things purchased from 1 place). This is a great feature for us as well, because we pay some things directly out of our checking with online bill pay, or a direct debit from our account, some with checks, some things with credit cards (which we pay off each month) and can put them in graphs, group by category, date, net income, or anything you want!
5. Did I mention... FREE.

After 3 months, we now have a much better idea of what is going where and can manage things much better this way, without spending a bunch of time entering receipts or trying to back-track auto-debit bills. I love it... you should check it out or let me know what you use to keep track of your $$$.