Tax Day!

The day has come! It is April 15th and tomorrow at this time I will feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. This has been my tenth tax season! TENTH!

Spring has an entirely different meaning since I've been working in public accounting. For instance, you have no idea what excitement birds chirping can bring. The first morning I hear birds chirping when I wake up I get excited because it means that we are out of winter and THAT much closer to the 15th. And there is a smell that comes with Spring. The first day I smell it I start to get excited for the end.

This year included 256.5 hours of overtime, thirteen Saturdays, two Sundays, four trips to the ER, two breakdowns (okay...three), hundreds of returns, thousands of emails and several caffeinated drinks.

Two hundred fifty-six and a half hours. What could one accomplish in that amount of time? And what did I miss in that amount of time? Think of all the cleaning, laundry, playing, sleeping, hugging and laughing I could have done in that time. It's sickening at the thought and I ususally spend the rest of the year trying to make up to my kids what I missed out the first four months of the year.

This year has been difficult for so many reasons - some professional, some personal. When you have two parents working so many hours it's hard to find time to fit in things like kids and household responsibilities, let alone time for each other. And when you add stress from work on top of everything else it tends to make the few moments you get together either venting sessions or a time to catch up on sleep.

It usually takes us a good week or two to recover from tax season and this year it may take a while longer.

We have both vowed that we cannot have another year like this. And if that means we have to give up on UPS, reluctantly, we will. Most families wouldn't survive the stresses we have faced these last three years and I think it is a testament to our relationship that we've held it together for so long. I had said at the beginning of this year that 2010 was going to be the year of UPS, what I left out was....."or else"!