Andelin Adventures

My sister had her baby today! How cool is it to have 11-12-13 as your birthday!

He wasn’t due until December, so he is a few weeks early. But he decided that this was going to be the day and here he is. He seems to be doing just perfectly.

Argh! Well I have finally broken and decided that it is time to banish the kids from the basement. They have not been taking care of it. They don’t keep their rooms clean. I have been finding scribbling on the walls. They have been snitching food from the storage room, which resulted in us putting a lock on it. Then they kept stealing the key so they could get into it anyway, which resulted in us changing the lock to one that requires a real key, instead of just one of those stick things that you put in a hole and turn the thing inside with. I have been wearing the key around my neck so they can’t get it. I have also found raw egg downstairs. Egg slime on the storage room door, and on the floor in the laundry room. Egg shells on the floor of the bedroom, and in dresser drawers. They have been climbing on the book case in the family room, which is causing damage to the holes that hold the pins that hold the shelves up. Tonight they pulled the last straw!

I originally had the idea to move the kids out of the basement back in September. They haven’t been taking care of it for longer than that. I was in a rage, ready to just take all of their stuff away so that all they were left with was beds in empty rooms. But I didn’t know where to put all of their stuff. The garage is still full of the stuff we moved out of the basement so that we could get it finished, so there is no way all of their stuff is going out there. Then I had the thought to just move the kids back upstairs and put a lock on the basement door to keep them out of there. Kyle came home from work and we discussed this option. Kyle brought it up with the kids. He gave them the option of losing everything and coming upstairs to sleep again, or that they could get their rooms in order. I knew that they were going to choose the latter option, but that they weren’t actually going to do it, but Kyle gave them the option and they picked and I had to wait it out a bit. I did also feel bad about making a change like that, that particular weekend because it was Dinah’s birthday. I felt like it just wouldn’t be right to do something like that on her birthday.

Back to tonight: I had a dentist appointment the day after Halloween and since I was in town, I decided to go clearance Halloween shopping after my appointment. I got lots of cool stuff! I got a giant pumpkin bucket for $3! I had been checking it out every time I was at that store all October, and they had a couple left and it was now on clearance so I just had to get it.

I got some more Mr Potato head style pumpkin decorations. I got Ethan a costume for next year, since I know that the Kangaroo costume is the only costume that we have that is anywhere close to his size and it’s borderline too small for him this year. I also got some pumpkin carving kits. Not because I wanted the pumpkin carving tools really, but because I wanted the books of carving patterns. So all of this clearance stuff came in the house and ended up on the living room floor in piles, needing to be packed away for next year. Before getting it packed up I needed to get all of the stuff we used this year gathered up and ready to be packed up too, so all the clearance stuff had to wait. Since the Halloween buckets were downstairs we decided to move the clearance stuff down there to wait for packing. Then the kids started messing with it….

Tonight it became a problem. The glue on the carving kits wasn’t very good and a couple of the packages came open. The kids then decided to start playing with the carving tools. I don’t know who started it, but the most dangerous tool ended up being the very sharp poky needle-like tool. Someone got a hold of one of those and started stabbing the book of carving patterns, and the tool then went missing, and that was it. As soon as I found out what was going on I went down there and sent all the kids upstairs to sit on the couch. I went around gathering up their pillows, and I came upstairs and asked Kyle to go downstairs and take the doorknob off the storage room door and put it on the basement door. There was then lots of wailing from the kids. They did not want to be banished from the basement, but they did not want the responsibility of taking care of it either. And I just couldn’t allow them to be down there while that tool was missing. That is a safety issue that I just could not risk.

We aren’t going to move their beds upstairs tonight, which means they will be sleeping on the hide-a-bed for a while. And I’ve got lots of stuff to move out of the office before we can even think about bringing the beds back up. So the transition will be a gradual one. The kids have been informed that they will have to earn back access to the basement by showing that they can take care of the space upstairs, so we will have to see how that goes.

We picked out the candy that we were going to use for Halloween, a couple of weeks ago when we discovered a new candy store. I had sent Kyle in to go check it out, while I waited in the car with the kids. He got super excited to find that they sold See’s sugar sticks. See’s doesn’t even sell their sugar sticks any more! Then we got even more excited to find that we could buy 200 of them for $5, which makes each stick about 2 cents. Right then we decided that was what we were passing out for Halloween, and picked up a couple of cases.

232 sugar sticks all ready and waiting for the trick or treaters to show up. 🙂

I spent the morning getting the porch all cleaned up so that it would look nice when we put the decorated pumpkins out. The kids spent the day freaking out that we hadn’t decorated the pumpkins yet. When I was a kid we always got the pumpkins ready on Halloween. For us that hasn’t always worked, especially when Kyle was working two jobs, and sometimes we have decorated them the night before (sometimes they got decorated after Halloween….) Today Debby came over after nap and we started decorating the pumpkins before Kyle got home, but finished the last few after he got home.

           

Kyle arrived home with our traditional pizza for dinner, and we tried to eat up and finish up the last few pumpkins at the same time. Then the first few trick or treaters made their appearance and we decided we had better get out there. I love that we can go while the sun is still up, and that means getting to bed at a somewhat decent hour when they are all done going around.

I usually stay home and try to clean house in between passing out candy every couple of minutes, but Debby offered to stay at the house and pass out candy so I could go out with Kyle and the kids.

By the time we had gone up one street and down the other side, we came back up part of our street, it was quite dark. So I stayed home to spend some time with Debby and to get Adam and Lydia ready for bed. But you can’t go to bed after trick or treating without having some candy first. Adam was happy just with a bottle of milk, Lydia on the other hand wanted to double dose on the lolly pops.

Kyle took the kids out for a little bit more and I think they just finished up the rest of our street, so we never even made it to the third street that makes up our ward. By the time they came back there weren’t very many more trick or treaters going around. At the end of the evening we had only 9 sugar sticks left in the basket. I was told that there were only a few kids that ended up taking 2 sugar sticks so that means we had around 200+ trick or treaters this year.