Where has all the time gone? A familiar phrase for most mothers, but there are times when I feel it more than others. This is one of those times.

See, I have this habit of staying up too late–only ’til midnight-ish–but when I should be getting up at 5:30 a.m. to get the kids to the school bus and myself to work on time, midnight-ish is too late. I’ve had good reasons this week though: Taxes and a budget.

I had been putting off doing my taxes because I was convinced I was going to have to pay in. This assumption was based on an estimation I had made, without my W2’s, and it had me in avoidance mode. However, with the impending arrival of next week and that magic date of April 15, denial time had to come to an end.

I sat down with all my important tax stuff and prepared to face reality. You know how when you use tax software, every addition updates that number, it get’s bigger, or smaller, or it’s in your favor or not…well mine was sucking–until I decided I should update my income information with data from my actual W2’s. This, my friends, made me very, very happy. That number dramatically shifted in my favor when I discovered what I’ll call an ‘estimation error’ of about $10,000. I’m not getting a lot back, but I am certainly NOT paying in.

My lesson from this? Don’t do your taxes ’til you have your W2’s–guessing is just not a good idea.

Once I realized I wouldn’t be scrounging to figure out how to pay the government, I decided it was time I updated my budget and made it realistic. I’m one of those people that always has a budget, but it falls more toward the fiction end of things. I mean I do look at it, and about every 3 months I’m geared up to buckle down and follow it–and then someone breaks an arm and I’ve got $1,600 of UN-budgeted expenses. This is when breakdown occurs.

Unbudgeted or not, I know life happens I’ve decided I just need to deal with it. I’m rereading my Suze Orman and just discovered Dave Ramsey and will be trying to at least focus on debt paydown and saving…that tax refund should help a bit.

Now that I have these two items under my belt, my time is back to focusing on my work. But I’ll still have to admit I’d love it if there was some Borg-like regeneration device that I could just ‘recharge’ myself in for a couple of hours (this is a Star Trek reference for all of you non-sci fi geeks out there ). I love sleep, but I’ve got only so much time…