January Financial Recap - where did all the money go?

Each month, I attempt to recap how we spent our money, and categories where we were over or under.

Here are the highlights (& lowlights from January):

Income (note that this doesn't include retirement, charitable donations, or healthcare, all of which is deducted automatically before we ever see the money):
Standard pay - $21,700
Bonus pay - $8,400
Total income for January = $30,100

Highlights:
We were at or below spending targets in the following categories:

• Boys (general bucket category) 
• Boys clothes
• Boys college
• Boys lessons
• Childcare (saved cash in December to pay for January's date night)
• Cleaning (the cleaner was on vacation, so we cleaned & saved $180)
• Gas
• Gifts
• Health
• Insurance
• My clothes
• Rent
• Liquor
• Vacation mortgage
• M's clothes
• Personal
• Seattle house utilities

Lowlights:

Areas where we were over our spending:

• Boys birthdays. Over by $7. Bought both boys a present (an organizer for their Rainbow Loom bands, which have taken over my house.) :-)
• Car - over by $967. :-( Major repair needed on my car, which is 9 years old.
• Dining out - over by $204, mostly due to my work trip. I had no idea I would have to pay for my own meals. Groan.
• Dry cleaning - over by $19. We've primarily switched to Dryel, and had to restock our supply.
• Entertainment - over by $90. We added this category for 2014, and ended up going on a day trip to Monterey. We'll balance this out by not doing anything similar in February.
• Groceries - over by $15. So close!
• House - over by $120. These were for our legal documents. Doesn't really belong in this category, but this is my "placeholder" category. ;-)
• San Francisco utilities - over by $109. The insulation in this house sucks big time, and the windows don't even seal. On "cold" nights, the heat runs forever.
• Vacation house utilities - over by $400. We have a yearly pay for a handyman/watch service that checks on our property weekly. Critical since we're not in the area.
• Toiletries - over by $56. We were out of everything. Hopefully we're stocked up & can lower this substantially in the next few months.
• Travel - over by $170. I purchased my mom's ticket to fly out and watch the boys in April.
• Seattle house mortgage - over by $17,748. Not really. ;-) We transferred $15,000 from savings to our HELOC, to reduce our interest. Our December payment also cleared in January, so two payments cleared during the same month. 

In total, we spent $20,662 (removing the $15,000 transfer, as that's mostly just shuffling money around). Our planned expenses were $19,098, so we were over by $1,600. We average out all of our yearly totals, so there are some totals that don't make sense on a monthly scale. In general, the only anomaly that concerns me for our yearly budget is the car expense of $1167. That will definitely put a dent in our yearly budget. 

How did you do with your January spending? Are you on track? If not, how will you adjust your spending to get back on track?