I had a major freakout tonight. I procrastinated my periodic assessment of the finances. Well, I finally got around to digging in and the pressure started to mount. Tuition is going up again, two of my kids need braces on their teeth, my family is getting after me about going on vacation, pretty soon there will be money flying out the door right and left to get three growing kids clothed and supplied to go back to school and... our health insurance premiums increased last month, we recently paid for repairs to the work van and I just bought new knee braces for one of the twins! I was looking at all of this stuff and I had a major panic attack. Damn. Sometimes being responsible is incredibly stressful.


Edited to add: I need to do something to let the rest of the anxiety from this little incident pass on out of here because I still feel a little tweaked. So... I am reminding myself that this is not a reason to panic. It has happened before and I will do what I always do when I look down the road and see a possible train coming - I move us off the tracks. It's my job. I tweak the business with the husband, I tweak the budget and I make the decisions that keep us from being run over by a future train. Still - every time this happens - every time I sit down to look at recent expenses and project the continued pattern onto the future and see that things might get ugly at a certain point? I panic. And then I make the necessary changes to make sure that things remain on a proper course. One of these days I will find a way to skip the part where I panic before I fix things back up to where they ought to be.