I asked Amanda to write about my day while I opened the windows to let in a breeze, since the rain outside tonight will keep down the pollen. What do I get for my efforts? Something shockingly inappropriate that I will not allow on this family website! Amanda, be ashamed!

I spent a good portion of my day filing the taxes while Amanda, Milly and Karen went to the Azalea Festival downtown. I’ve never been, but I really needed to get the taxes done and didn’t have a huge desire to go anyway.  Amanda said they had to park at the very edge of downtown and ended up doing a lot of walking, but Milly liked the parade, especially the marching band.

Back to the taxes, it ended up taking me a lot longer than it should have.  Since 2006, I’ve been doing my taxes with TaxAct.com and everything has been peachy.  I went through the online process with them today, and, to my great surprise, they said I owed almost as much in state taxes as I was getting back in federal returns.  Considering Amanda and I apparently made a little bit less than we did last year, I just didn’t see how that was right.

I went through the whole thing several times, and it did get better when I remembered to itemize some of my deductions, but it still had me paying quite a bit to the state.  There was no way that could have been the case, I figured, so I thought I’d try another online tax service.

I ended up using the online version of Turbo Tax.  It cost me about four times as much to file with them, but I also got about five times as much back total and ended up with a nice return from the state.  I don’t know if Tax Act just had some bug in their code or what, but that’s a pretty egregious error.  I’m very glad I followed up with it and checked it out.

By the time all the girls got home around 3:30, Milly hadn’t had a nap and we had plans to go over to the Hauensteins’ for dinner at 5:00, which didn’t leave her much time to sleep.  We did put her down though, hoping it would do some good, Karen took off, I finished redoing the taxes and then we left.  We figured we’d see how Milly did, and just cut our visit short if she got cranky.

Milly ended up doing just fine.  She played with Ayden’s toys, and after dinner (homemade, make-your-own pizza, which was delish), Ayden was running around in his walker while Milly stood on the back, like she was riding a chariot.  It was awesome!

The kids went down just fine.  Milly was a little upset when she realized it was bedtime, but she’d slept so little that she was quiet as soon as we shut the door.  Amanda and I introduced Justin and Lisa to Carcassonne and Justin won both games that we played with me scoring just two points less than him in both games!  Crazy.

Anyway, we had a good time with Justin and Lisa.  It’s been about a year since we’ve hung out with them and of course we all agreed that we needed to make it a more frequent thing.

Milly was out cold when I went to get her up.  I said her name, took a few pictures of her with the flash on (because she just looked so sweet!) and picked her up before she even started to wake up.  It was slightly surprising because I knew as soon as I stepped into Justin and Lisa’s room, where we had the pack & play set up, that she had a blowout.  Fortunately Amanda let me busy myself with taking things back out to the car while she changed the diaper.  That sucker was full.

Zach Dotsey
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