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Some folks keep baby books up to date, marking first smiles, first teeth, first crawls… We attempted it with Cora, but I’m afraid I’m not conscientious about recording that sort of stuff. With Callie, it’s been even worse. I don’t have any sort of baby book for her.

Just scanned back through some blog entries, though. I give them a category as I write them, and I have a category for MommyHood. Some comment spammer left a comment on a way-old entry that talked about a prediction that Cora would walk by 10 months. As it turned out, she didn’t walk by 10 months – she sort of stalled and waited until she turned a year old – but the entry lists other milestones, like when she scooted backwards (6 1/2 months), and when she crawled forward (7 1/2 months).

Cora’s little sis, Callie, is a little bit over 6 months old. Her latest exciting milestone was rolling over – she did it for the first time on Easter this year, much to the excitement of Aunt Paula and Daddy, who were coaxing her at the time. Now, that little fact hasn’t been entered in a baby book anywhere. But I can now look at the archives for our blog and see the previous entry for Cora, and now this one for Callie. And then hop over to our image gallery to see pictures of the girls at the appropriate ages.

So, my Creative Memories consultant isn’t making anything off of me, but I’ve got the info I want as both images and text, interspersed with other blog entries that show what was important enough for me to write about it at the time. Works for me, baby book or no…

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I’m one in 30 million… That’s the number of folks who supposedly wait until the last week to submit their tax returns. I used to turn my in as late as possible in years where I owed money, just on the theory of getting every last cent of interest on that money in my bank account. This year, though, we were one of the many Americans getting money back that we’d “loaned” the government for its use during the year. Just work has kept me so busy that we didn’t get around to finishing up our paperwork until, oh, 3:00 in the morning this morning. More specifically, I put down my Jane Hancock early this morning – Jas did all of the various wrestling with various forms that took an hour to complete and made an impact of $1.11 in the final amount of our tax return. In our favor, at least, but $1.11? For an hour’s worth of work, between examining instructions, tracking down the info, and then doing the calculations? That hour’s worth of work would be of more value to me and to society if I spent it helping in a soup kitchen. Heck, if I sold drugs on a street corner, I’d provide more value, just in the terms of the sales tax I’d generate when I bought my fancy car, jewelry, and other trappings.

I heard an interesting piece of trivia the other day that said that 45 cents on every dollar collected goes to the cost of collecting the other 55 cents. Boy, that’s a lousy ROI – I’d never give a charitable organization any money that told me their cost of fundraising was 45%.

Interesting tax trivia (whether they’re true or not, I can’t vouch):
* National Retail Sales Tax – Virginia Chapter
* Cato institute facts and figures

The government needs money to do its job for me – I get that. But don’t make me spend hours trying to figure out whether I’m doing the right thing, paying the right amount, filling out the right forms… the tax on my time and my stress is worse than the cost of the dollars. I owe the gov’t the dollars… I don’t owe them the time and stress.