Come on Irene! Oh wait...wrong song.

Well, our family escaped the path of Hurricane Irene last week.  Our home got no real damage, but we were without power for an undetermined amount of time.  We spent the weekend at my sister's home, and our daughters had a blast playing together.  Amelia is fairly bored today, and keeps asking for her cousins.  Poor kid. Stuck with boring ol' Mom.

Before our trip, I managed to scoot over to Target to "pick up a few things".  I admit, I got caught up in the frantic nature of the storm.  Those local news anchors will get you every time.  RUN!! BUY!! HOARD!!

Anyway, while I was inspecting an aisle that bottled water had in fact occupied a week before... I had a moment of clarity.  Why am I worried?  We are leaving town.  I have plenty of dry goods already at my house.  I coupon shop, so I don't need to re-create my entire pantry.   I'm sure there are other stores out there in the universe, in case I do need this bottle of fizzy, berry-flavored water.

So, I settled on picking up diapers, wipes, and a few kid snacks that I had previously known we would need.  I put back several other items I had tossed in.  Good job, Target.  I bought in.  Thankfully, I did a good self-check before I checked out.

It was a good reminder this weekend that having a strong budget (with some wiggle room) is always a necessity.  A natural disaster hitting is a good reason, and perhaps an excuse, to blow the budget.  Even though we spent more than we had planned, we can easily adjust and allot ourselves some forgiveness.  We might have to cut back next month a bit to even things out.  Come Hell or high water (literally), the budget remained.

Well, there was the emergency pedicure...but we will budget that under sisterly bonding.  Right? :)