Ouch!

Thursday night I went to bed without any unusual aches or pains. Friday morning I woke up with a throbbing left arm and a very limited range of motion. The pain level didn't decrease over the course of the day. I kept wondering why I was so cold. I kept putting on more layers, and then it struck me I probably had a fever. The thermometer confirmed I did. Since I had no other symptoms, I assumed the fever was just due to the pain I had been enduring all day. Although it's not my dominant arm, I discovered yesterday that MANY activities are very challenging to do with only one hand. I was so exhausted from the pain that I took ibuprofen and went to bed shortly after Paul got home from work at 7pm. He had to help me change into my pajamas. I slept for about 11 hours on either my back or my right side. Usually I alternate between my right and left sides throughout the night. I am not sure why I didn't take any ibuprofen yesterday until Paul came home from work. I have dealt with back pain many times over the years, but I can't ever recall having arm pain before. My hands frequently go numb due to carpal tunnel, but that has never been extremely painful. Paul was planning to go to work today, but when he saw that I was still in pain and could only move my arm a little bit, he thought he should take me to the doctor this morning. He didn't think I could drive. I called my sister instead. She was an occupational therapist so this type of thing is up her alley so to speak. She suggested buying Aleve and a sling and using ice. I used a heating pad last night. The CVS didn't open until 9:00, and by the time Paul got home from going there, he didn't think it was worth driving to work as he usually comes home about 5 hours earlier on Saturdays than he does M-F. The ice + Aleve + sling has helped me in that I'm no longer in a constant state of pain. However most tasks that involve using both hands are still excruciating such as cutting two apples into slices at lunch today. The swelling in my hand and fingers in that hand is also going down some although not enough for me to get my wedding band on yet. I should add that we never got my wedding band sized. It's usually loose on me, but since we did get the engagement ring sized I've never worried that I might lose the wedding band. So my finger has to be fairly swollen if I can't even put my wedding band on. Usually in the winter when I'm cold all my rings a little big on me, but not my left hand right now. Yvonne advised that if I don't see improvement by Monday to go to a doctor at that point. I'm hoping that the Aleve plus sling plus ice will do the trick. I am assuming I injured myself while sleeping on Thursday night. I hope I never do that again!!!!

Thankfully, shopping online on Black Friday doesn't require me to my left arm. I have 37 people on my list as far as whom I am buy Christmas gifts for - that includes our five kids we sponsor through Compassion and the five shoe boxes we filled for kids through Samaritan's Purse. In the case of the Compassion kids, we send each of them money. The other 27 people are family members and some of them (such as Paul, Paul's dad, my dad, and Ian) I'm also buying them birthday gifts as their birthdays are between December 10-January 3. I had already purchased and wrapped some gifts, but I did a lot more shopping online over the last two days. I have finished the birthday shopping, and I only have four people left to buy Christmas gifts for. The end is in sight! I really cut back how much we spent on gifts from August 2019 to October 2020 because we were back to living on one income, but even though 2020 was a tough year for some people financially, it wasn't for our family so just in the last two weeks I've spent almost as much on gifts as I did in the previous twelve months put together because I decided to put the gift budget back to closer to what it had been in the past. Although most of my "Black Friday" purchases were for Christmas gifts, I did also buy six bags of bedding for the guinea pigs because the pet stores were having good sales, and I bought quite a few books because both Target and Amazon are having a buy two books get one free sale. Some of the books will be Christmas gifts for Paul, Nadia, and Julianna. I got myself one book, and I bought nine books that I plan to use with the kids for our family devotions together. Lately we've been using books from the Inductive Bible Studies for Kids series by Kay Arthur and Janna Arndt. We finished one on prayer and have almost finished one on the names of God. A few years ago I bought five of them at a book sale at the Lewisburg library.

Speaking of the budget, I've started working on our budget for 2021. Some categories are very easy to predict such as what we spend for my phone, car insurance, life insurance, the internet, garbage collection, water, sewer, and clothes. Of the categories I just listed, the one that has varied more than the others would be clothing, but the difference is still rather small. The past four years we spent between $502-642 per year on clothes; we spent a bit less than normal this year ($474). Personal (things Paul and I buy that don't fit anywhere else in the budget) is also a fairly stable category aside from the year I bought my new camera body, but again we still spent less than usual in that category this year. The cost for internet goes up every spring, but they didn't raise the price this year! I am guessing that due to COVID they decided it wasn't the time for the annual price hike. Other categories are rather hard to predict. How much we've spent on medical expenses has ranged from as high as $14K in 2011 to as little as $306 last year. This year we spent about $1,500. Car repairs is another unpredictable category (from as little as $179 to as much as $1,773 over the past 5 years). We've typically spent between $2K-4K on gas each year. Since it was close to $4K last year and this year, that's what I'm budgeting for next year. Although Paul's vehicle gets better gas mileage than the van, he drives at least 600 miles a week, which means he buys gas far more often than I do. How much we've spent on the house has also varied greatly from as little as $231 in 2014 to almost $12K last year because we replaced the deck, furnace, and A/C. We spent far less on the house this year as the garage doors cost a lot less than last year's projects did. I'm not sure when we will replace the 22 year old roof, but I'm guessing we'll be replacing the oven next year. One of the four burners gave up the ghost already. 

This year we spent less than I expected in several categories. We used to have cable year round, but from 2013-2019 we only had cable for a few months each year so our total expenditure for tv (which includes our Amazon Prime subscription), was generally less than $400 per year. This year we spent less than $200 because we didn't turn the cable on this fall as we usually do. I'm thinking our only "tv" expenditures for next year will be our Amazon Prime membership plus our Disney+ membership. I honestly never thought Paul would lose interest in watching the Giants, but 2020 has been a very unique year. Although the cost of most things tends to rise over time (ex. from 2008 to the present our monthly internet bill went from $33 to $76), natural gas is one that has gone down over the years - from a high of $1,112 in 2009 to a low of $450 this year. Our electric bills have also declined over the years - from a high of $2,126 in 2011 to a low of $1,186 in 2017. I'm going to estimate $1,400 for next year's budget. I had planned to try to spend less on the kids, entertainment, and gifts this year in light of living off of one income. We spent far more on the kids in 2018 and 2019 than we had any other year (homeschool materials, summer camps, purchases for the guinea pigs, athletics, and other classes are what primarily constitute that category). COVID-19 made it easier than expected to cut back in that category in 2020. We spent about $3K less this year on the kids than we did last year. COVID also meant we spent less on vacations. Our vacation budget this year was 1/2 of what we typically spend and 1/4 of what we spent in 2018. In 2018 we spent far more on entertainment than we usually do. We cut back a lot last year, and I had planned to cut back more this year, and again COVID made that a piece of cake. I'd have to go back to 2010 to find a year we spent less on entertainment than we did this year. One category we spent more in this year was food. From 2016-2018 we spent around $4600 per year on food. Last year we spent a little over $5K on food. I had set a goal to try to get back to $4,600 but we actually spent a little more this year than last year. However considering we spent far less on entertainment and took far fewer vacations, I think we did well. Three weeks of vacations were cancelled this year which means I bought groceries for three more weeks of the year than I would have if there wasn't a pandemic. Plus the kids' appetites are growing so it might prove impossible to get back to $4600, but I will start 2021 with more meat in the freezer than usual so who knows. Maybe it will be possible to get back to $4,600? Time will tell, but I'm setting the food budget at $5,000 for 2021 to err on the safe side. One of the unexpected financial bonuses was the "stimulus" check we received. Since the government already has an insanely large deficit, I hope there won't be another check coming our way from the government.  At some point we'll need to replace my 7 year old phone and my almost 5 year old laptop, for example. Because we already have money set aside for replacing the roof, Ian's braces, and replacing my vehicle, it will be easier for us to afford other "unexpected" type of expenses that will inevitably come up from time to time. I'm grateful to be entering 2021 without the financial stress I had in 2019 once I realized I was returning to being a stay-at-home mom.

Ian made quite the procession to visit Baby Jesus!