Chistmas '08

Christmas '08 started out with a bit of hard labor. I got home around 12:30 from work. Jen and I had a couple of things that we wanted to do before going to grandma's house. I had heard that we were expecting 1 to 3 inches of snow that night so I wanted to get the driveway cleared before it started. There was about 1/2 an inch of ice caked on the drive, but it was finally above freezing which gave me the opportunity to get underneath it. Grandma C's car actually slid down the driveway and into the street while she was watching the boys. (yes our driveway is steep and it sucks). The traditional snow shovel wouldn't work so I had to break out a regular shovel to break up the ice. For the most part the ice came up pretty good, but with only a 6 inch blade it took a lot longer than usual. After an hour I was almost halfway down the driveway and had shed my coat because I was just too flippin hot. At one point I stepped on the ice to get a better angle for the shovel and ended up taking a ride down the driveway. After busting my butt for an hour and a half, I got close to the bottom of the driveway and figured that was good enough. I found out later that the snow had been cancelled, but I still wanted to take the opportunity to get the ice taken care of.

Anyway, after the ice shoveling Jen and I did a few things around the house. Since the road conditions were still a little tricky I decided to skip church for the evening. Yeah I know I should have tried to make it, but the thought of dealing with 3 kids in a standing room only church for over an hour didn't sound like fun. We loaded the kids up and headed over to mom's house. Usually Jen has to close the store on Christmas eve, but somehow she ended up opening the store so we didn't have to wait for her to show up to mom's house. When Jen closed on Christmas she would show up and be half awake for the evening. I was able to talk mom into just doing appetizers instead of a meal for Christmas eve which worked out so much easier. Trying to get the kids to sit still for any food is a challenge. We had shrimp cocktail, cookies, crackers, chips, and some other snacks. We visited and snacked and started the presents early this year. It looked like we had taken it easy this year on the presents, but by the time everything was opened (along with presents being brought from other rooms) it was a madhouse of toys for the boys. The boys got a HUGE lincoln log set that Dan had set up in the front room that was alot of fun and destroyed minutes later. More snacking and drinking later we decided to head for home. I was amazed to see that we were loading up the car by 9:00pm. Last year we were delayed leaving mom's house due to me having to clean up Andrew's puke from mom's carpet. Yet another reason not to fill the boys up with food, especially Andrew. We got the boys to bed pretty quick and still had some present wrapping to do so we were up until after midnight doing that.

Christmas morning like almost every morning the first visitors come into our room before 7:00am (yawn). We trudge downstairs and the boys immediately start playing with the toys from last night and don't even notice the stockings or the presents under the tree. We grab a little something to eat before the present carnage II begins. I am not sure how many years ago,but I remember that a tradition started in the family that we have honey buns and orange juice for breakfast on Christmas morning. Now usually the honey buns were from the Morton company, but they went out of business or stopped producing honey buns years ago. So every year I search for a reasonable substitute. I have finally found a honey bun that is real similar and I can get it at Walmart/Sams club. The kids are finally getting the idea of gifts, almost too much, and started to get a little greedy toward the end of the day. One of the gifts that I found cool too was a miniature remote controlled helicopter. William actually understands how to control the helicopter and can hover it in place a couple of feet off the ground. Andrew (el distructo) only knows full throttle which drives the chopter straight into the ceiling and then bouncing off the fireplace. I am hoping that this toy will hang around a little while longer (yeah I like playing with it too). The funny part is that I sent one of these helicopters to my dad for Christmas too. I can never decide what to get my dad so I usually send him something fun to play with or something for the pool.

After carnage II we load up the boys to go to grandma and grandpa C's for carnage III. We had a very tasty turkey lunch and then opened more presents. Somewhere during the middle of present opening I look over at Andrew.... mouth opens... and hurl. Son of a B****. Jen grabs one of her brand new tupperware containers to catch the last bit of urp. So instead of my mom's house I get to clean up Jen's mom's house for Christmas. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful and pretty nice. I took Christopher into the in-laws bedroom to take a nap and ended up freezing my butt off while trying to get him to sleep. They like a cold bedroom for sleeping and so would I, if I would have had a blanket. Every time I tired to get up Christopher stirred and woke up crying so I was stuck. After a couple of hours (and a few cat naps) I took him back into the front room. We headed home around 8:00 or so.

Overall I think it was a very good Christmas..It was nice to start Christmas eve a little earlier and have Jen semi-conscious. For the most part the boys were very well behaved and Christopher stayed away from the tree. Their new thing is that every toy they have MUST be out of the box that it came in even if they don't plan on playing with it.

Ice Ice Baby

Thought I would put some pictures of the ice storm that hit the Fort last week. The above picture is the rose of sharon tree that is usually straight up in the air. I thought for sure that the limbs would break or the tree would split since it alreay has a bit of a crack in the trunk. After the ice melted the tree rebounded pretty well. I have quite a few small branches down in the back yard, but I am not stranger to that since it happens all year long.

I would love to post a video I took but blogger still won't let me load in video for some reason. If I get time I might look into that. Who am I kidding. I barely have time to blog.

My perfectly effed up Friday

** I appolgize in advance for any expletives that this entry might contain ***

My effed up Friday started Thursday night when I got home from work. I walk in the door and see William asleep on the couch. Now usually he doesn't sleep in the afternoon unless he is sick, and even then he hasn't slept in the afternoon in quite a long time. Usually a little side effect of his napping is that he is a bear to go to bed at night. The good news is that he doesn't have a cold, the bad news is that he was a bear to go to bed. Jen had to work Friday morning so the alarm has to go off at 5:30am. I would like to go to bed since it is going to be an early morning, but William keeps coming out of his room because he isn't tired. He went from just walking out on the landing to going into his brother's room and jumping on him (which Andrew doesn't budge, man, he's a heavy sleeper). Finally after midnight I just take him into our bedroom and set up a pillow and blanket on the floor for him to crash. I am not sure how much longer he was awake, but I only made it a few minutes before I was sawing logs. The 5:30 alarm came wayyyyy too early, so Jen got up and started getting ready with William sleeping on the floor. She informs me that school is cancelled for the day so that will make is easier on the babysitters not having to cart all the kids around to drop off and pick up William. Around 6:15 Andrew comes walking in the room and I try to get him to sleep next to me for just a little longer, but he is persistent that he wants and needs his "cereal and milk" ASAFP. He is real persistent about needing it as soon as he wakes up. The child has not patience (what kid does). As I am following him down the hall to get him "HIS PRECIOUS..." the power goes out in the house. Crap. So I take Andrew downstairs and get out the flashlights that I have stashed away for just such emergencies. I have come to find out that if a cricket farts it will knock out power to our grid so I have started putting together these kits so I know where they are. If the kids get ahold of them they become playthings so I can never find them and usually they have dead batteries. It really sucks being on the edge of the grid, I know that we are because I can look across the street and see their freakin' Christmas lights. I know it's not their fault they have power and we have a crappy grid, but it still pisses me off. The last time our grid went down for whatever reason it was gone for an hour or so, but in looking outside and seeing all of the trees bent over with ice I had a feeling that it would be alot longer. So I help Jen get out of the garage so she can leave for work and I run upstairs to get ready myself. We called Jen's mom (we knew she would be up at 6:30am) and arranged that I would drop the kids off to her house on the way to work. So I am trying to get myself and the 3 boys ready to go in the dark as well as bottles and food, and etc. It's so funny how I would still turn on light switches while going through the house, just a force of habit I think. Now usually if I leave at 7:30 I can make it to work on time, but trying to get everything packed up wasn't going to let that happen so I knew I was going to be a little late. Before I leave I go down to the basement to check out the sump pump since I can hear the back-up running. The back up pump is doing it's jog pretty well, but it seems to be running quite alot. This is where I notice that the check valve on the pump is not working correctly again and its allowing the water in the pipe to back up into the sump so its working twice as often as it should. I forget how long the battery is good for on this system, but I am thinking that it is 12 hours. So I load the kids up and head out on some real nasty roads. The mains aren't too bad, but the secondaries are dangerous. Of course the in-laws live 3 miles down on a hilly county road so that was real interesting. As I pull up to the in-laws house I hit the garage door opener and ... nothing. Finally I go up to the front door where my mother in law greets me and says that they just lost power. She tried to call me (oh by the way did I mention that my cell phone was dead) and let me know. So after debating what to do I decide to take the kids to my mom's house since the in-laws are on a well so they don't have any running water and my mom still has power. So I load the kids up for ride to my mom's house. She lives down the street from me so I had to backtrack almost all the way back to my house dodging trees hanging in the streets and broken limbs. Finally I head up to work and notice that the further North that I go the less ice there is on the trees. I get to work an hour and a half late,but ended up having a pretty good day there. How sad is it that the best part of my day was working. I kept calling the house hoping that the answering machine would pick up, thus letting me know that we had power again but no luck. After getting off work I headed home to check on things like the sump pump and the cat. Surprisingly it wasn't that cold in the house, I think around 60 degrees. I did notice the sump back up was still going off pretty often so I decided to try and drain the sump out to see if I could conserve a little of the battery life since it had been 12 hours of it running. Before getting the battery back up for the sump pump, the plan for getting power to the sump in an emergency was to plug into a DC converter that we bought for the car and run the pump. This was my ultimate back up plan before the battery. Of course I had never tested it and just assumed it would work. So I hook everything up and.. nothing. I couldn't even plug it an extension cord into the converter without it freaking out. Thank God I didn't have to use it before the battery or I would have been totally fubared. So I am trying to think of what to do next. I know there probably isn't a generator to buy or rent on this end of town and I am not sure I want to try getting another converter. I ended up heading over to mom's to have a little dinner and make a plan of attack with Jen. I have a little dinner and just sit there dazed, trying to think of what to do next. The boys and Jen are going to spend the night at grandma's and I decide to spend the night at our house to keep an eye on the sump and run the gas fireplace to get a little heat in the house so it doesn't get too cold for the cat or the pipes. After eating I am getting ready to head back to the house and the boys are in with grandma in her bedroom watching Christmas shows. All of a sudden I hear Andrew scream. Now I know Andrew's screams and this is the serious one. I take off to the bedroom and see mom running Andrew into the bathroom with blood running down his face. Supposedly mom's dog Willie was asleep on the bed and Andrew startled him, so Willie bit him on the face. We are working on cleaning him up and he calms down a little bit. The one gash on his lip looks pretty deep so I decide to take him to the ER just in case. So we load up Andrew and take off for the hospital. Of course we have to head home first since that's where our new medial insurance cards are. As Jenny is inside grabbing the cards I tell her to grab her frozen breast milk so we can store it in mom's freezer, just in case, but we were too late and all of her milk (or "white gold" as I call it) was already defrosted, but good news the sump was still running. So we take Andrew to the ER and got in pretty fast since no one in their right mind would be out in crappy weather like this. The doctor didn't see a need for stitches since it wasn't deep enough, so they just cleaned him up and put some medicine on the cuts. Thinking about it later, I think the doctor was a guy I went to grade school with, but I didn't make the connection since I had alot of other crap to worry about. This is the third time that Willie has bit one of the boys. So we get back to my mom's house and get the boys situated with their sleeping bags and pillows. I head back to our house and try to settle in and get some sleep. I took everything out of the fridge and put it outside to keep it cold. I should have done it earlier,but I just wasn't thinking straight. Everything in the freezers still looked pretty frozen. I start a fire in the fireplace, but it hasn't been on in years so the whole house gets filled with a burning smell for a while. The smoke detectors are beeping every couple of minutes to let me know the power is out and they are running on batteries since they are tied into the house electric. And the sump is running like crazy. So with the fire going, I crank up a radio (I actually had to crank it to get it to work) and listen to Christmas music. My old reliable Mag flashlight goes out with a burnt bulb (of course). I ended up going downstairs and manually emptying the sump pump with a bucket, thinking that it would be good for a while. I am settled in front of the fire with a beer thinking if I can just ignore the beeps of the smoke detectors that I can catch some sleep. Nope. The sump alarm goes off again, so back down to empty the sump. I am heading back down every 10 minutes and bringing up 3 buckets of water at at time. One of the times down there I notice one of the system lights is indicating that the battery is nearing a full discharge. The only way I can think of recharging this battery is to run it upstairs and jump it with the car. So I am past exhaustion, smoke detectors beeping, winding up the radio every few minutes, going downstairs every 10 minutes to empty the sump, I am preparing myself for a looooonnnggggggg freakin' night. It's a little after midnight when I am heading upstairs from the basement with another bucket of water when I hear some humming. But it wasn't the hum from the sump pumps, it sounded like the hum of the furnace, but there wasn't any lights on in the house. Then I remembered that I had turned them all off in the morning. I hit the switch in the kitchen and Thank God there is power. Rather than go back to mom's I decided to spend the night in the house in case the power went out again so I crashed on the couch. At 5:30am the garage door opens as Jen stopped by the house before going to work to brush her teeth (I forgot to pack that). I threw the food back into the fridge (saved most of it) and headed back to mom's. I ended up crashing on her couch until Andew woke up promptly at 6:50am and we were up for the day. As quickly as possible I packed up the kids to take them home. I figured that it would be easier to watch them at our house and I could possibly take a few cat naps while they played around me. I ended up having enough energy in the afternoon to make Christmas cookies. Jen got home and took a little nap in the afternoon as well. Later that night the in-laws came over to watch the boys while we went to MR's Christmas party. They still didn't have power so with babysitting the boys it was also an opportunity to take a shower, do some laundry and grab some water for flushing toilets. We had alot of fun at MR's party. It's so nice being around adults and not having to worry about what the boys are getting into. We ended up staying until after midnight which is alot later than I thought we would last.

All of the trees still have a ton of ice on them so there is a chance that we could loose power again, especially with it being a windy day outside. Currently it's 4 degrees outside and they don't call for temps to be anywhere near 30 degrees until the middle of the week, so we have all week to wonder if we will loose power again. My flashlights are ready .....

let it snow, let it snow

So the plans for the weekend were kind of busy Saturday, but Sunday was looking pretty good. Saturday morning we woke up to a snowy day. Just enough to coat the ground and the streets so driving was very nasty. Jen had to get up and go into work so the boys and I had kind of a lazy day. Well as lazy as it can get chasing 3 boys all over the place and trying to keep Andrew from distroying the house. Jen got home around 2 oclock so I trudged outside to shovel the driveway. There was only about an inch on the driveway, but I try and keep ahead of it if I can before we drive over it. The driveway clears much easier when you aren't hitting tire tracks. After getting the driveway done I had to do a little repair on the snow blower. The last time that we used the blower, Jen broke it. I think she did it on purpose so she wouldn't have to do it again. I mean she uses it once in 7 years and breaks it? (well maybe not once.... twice). When she was priming the blower and the primer bulb falls apart. I figured that I better get it fixed since you never know anymore when the "big one" might hit. I stopped by a local outdoor equipment place and plunked down $1.89 for a new one.I thought it might be a whole assembly, but it was a simple piece of rubber. Anywhooo after shoeveling I am out in the garage trying to get the new bulb put on. I am trying to follow the guys instructions on how to replace it, but it isn't going like it should (of course). It would go so much easier if I could pop out the primer assembly since it is only clipped in, but I am real hesitant on how much pressure I can assert on the clip seeing how the blower is at least 10 year old and knowing my luck I can hear "snap... sigh.. crap" in my future. Finally I decide to give it a little more ooomph since the new bulb is real tight and since I am outside in 30 degree weather it's loosing it's flexibility. So I close my eyes, say a little prayer, and give it a little more and "pop" it comes out and doesn't break.. whoo hoooo. After getting the assembly off ,the blub goes on very easy and then snaps right back to place. I put everything back together, throw in a little gas, and crank it up. With the help of electric start it starts very easy and runs pretty good. After getting that done I come inside to thaw out a little bit. Then Jen and I get ourselves ready to go out. Saturday night was my company Christmas party. The in-laws get over around 5:30pm with stories of very nasy roads. We head out and up to the Bridgewater Country Club in Auburn. It was a pretty nasty ride up to a very nice country club. Since this is my first Christmas party at this company I am not sure how things work, so Jen and I sit down at the table with a couple of tellers that I know. I was going to take Jen around and introduce her to some people, but we were already late because of the snow and I wasn't sure if they would do an introduction thing (which they didn't). So we just sat there and talked to the other people and had dinner. There were some very tasty appetisers as well as delicious entrees of almond crusted steak with garlic/butter potatos. After dinner they did a contest where you had to guess the employee from their baby pictures. I got 7 right just out of shear luck and guessing. After that the party was basicly over. I had the chance to introduce Jen to a few of my co-workers, but not as many as I could have. We headed for home and the roads were actually better beause they were more slush than ice.
Sunday Jen didn't work so I thought it would be another lazy day... I was wrong. I got up and went to 8:30 mass, home to have a quick breakfast, and then out the door again with Jen and the kids to 10:30 service at her church. We got a call Saturday from our friend Tracy telling us that her two boys were going to be baptised at 10:30. We showed up to a standing room only church due to the baptisms as well as a children's choir.Lately the boys have been doing pretty well in church as long as we have curious George fuit snacks, a bowl of cereal, and some water. Usually William has to go to the bathroom at least once during the service and of course Andrew has to go with us. Well today I took William to the bathroom without Andrew and he had a meltdown for Jen while I was gone. After the service we stuck around and talked to Tracy and the boys for a little bit. When we got home Jen worked on feeding the boys while I worked on dragging in the Christmas tree and decorations. Jen and I got the tree put together,but then had to work on trying to get a whole strand of lights to work. Then we had to work on getting the William and Andrew a bath for the family Chistmas card picture. So quick baths and then getting everyone dressed and out the door for a 3:50 appointment at Penny's which we actually made. The boys did very well exept we couldn't get Christopher to smile, and he actually had a nap! The photographer was having a problem with glare from my glasses so I had to tilt my head down to the point that I was looking at the floor, so I look funny in the pictures. Stay tuned to your mailboxes for a Christmas card coming soon (just ignore me). We got done there and headed home. I ran down to Pizza Hut to pick up one of those "Panormous" pizzas that was very tasty and a pretty good deal.
So here I sit with the boys (and Jen) asleap upstairs and I am looking at a Christmas tree with no lights or decoration (we just didn't have the time today). So far so good with the boys keeping away from the tree, but we will see how things go with decorations on it.