Taxes are done... now what??

I've have worked on my taxes for hours. When I say hours, I mean like 50 hours! It was insane. So I finally finished today, 45 minutes before April 15. Officially they were done before the due date, right? Here's the deal. We kind of had big plans for our return. Last year, we got back like $6000 for federal and owed like $400 to state. I file this year. My income is way up, BUT my expenses are way down. I'm wondering if I did some figures wrong. I'm going to go through my receipts and notebooks and see if I missed something somewhere. Not tomorrow. Probably not in the next week even. But sometime. So for the first time EVER, we owe federal taxes. $684 to be exact. But we're getting a state refund- $692. Woohoo.. we made $8. Score. I think I'll go buy... hmmm... not much I can buy with $8. To make things a little worse, I file with Turbo Tax and because of the type of business I have and my write offs, I have to use their business program. And something about filing my state taxes cost me extra... so just to file cost me about $140. Since I wasn't planning on owing (Why do I just assume things anymore? It never works out!), it was a shock to my system that I had to come up with roughly $830 in 45 minutes. Fun times. Thank goodness I had the good sense not go on a huge shopping spree this morning.

Now that my taxes are done, I can actually breathe again. I have been consumed by them for weeks, if not months. I haven't cleaned like I should have. My laundry has fallen to the wayside. It's clean, not folded! I will have to take a picture of dryer vomit and post in a few days. Unless I actually get it folded and put away now that I have my evenings free. Kind of... but that's another post! Now that I have a little extra time, the kids and I are going to spend a little time in the evening reading. We like to go through book series. We did The Little House on the Prairie books last winter. We aren't going to do a series this time. I tried the Narnia books, but.... oh man, I hate to admit this... I really don't like C.S. Lewis books. Maybe I just haven't gotten into them, but I can't do it! I've tried and if I get enough hate mail, maybe I'll try one more time. I thought they were brutal. This time we are reading STOUT-HEARTED SEVEN by Neta Lohnes Frazier. It is about the 7 Sager children that were orphaned on their way out west on the Oregon in 1844 and were later involved in the Whitman Massacre in Washington. These kids were my Grandfather's 2nd cousins. My mother was a Sager and our family cherishes their heritage so I was told it was time to pass it down to my kids. So we'll be reading the book and maybe I'll take the kids to the Whitman Mission this summer to visit.