House Rules

(A post by an Elf, without correction and edited only for brevity.  I had no idea our household had so many rules!)

1.  Do not dissobey Parents
2.  take off your shoes at the door
3.  Clean your room, every-day
4.  Do not complain
5.  If you're not sure, ask Mom.
6.  If Mom or Dad are eating, do not ask them any-thing.
7.  You must have socks when putting on shoes.
8.  Help your yonger siblings
9.  Help your older siblings.
10.  Do not lie.
11.  Ask before you do.
12.  Do not resort to violence, Tell Mom or Dad.
13.  Do not buy things without Mom/Dads premition.

Special Rule AKA Purple Dinosour

Do NOT correct Mom on ANY-thing.

(Editor's note:  This one is a real rule at our house!  If Mom tells a school worker/ doctor/ other stranger something that doesn't sound right, eeeeeven if she claims that a purple dinosaur came by and did a dance in our living room, do not correct Mom.  You will get into soooo much trouble for making Mom look like a liar and you do not always know the whole story like you think you do.)

14.  Do not punish your younger siblings, tell Mom/Dad
15.  If Mom/Dad tell you to do something, do it!
16.  Do not run away.
17.  acsept punishment.
18.  Do Not leave the Doors un locked
19.  Do not Ignore Mom/Dad
20.  If Mom and Dad are both gone, obey the oldest sibling in the house.
21.  If Mom and Dad dissagree, Obey Dad
22.  If Dad/Mom are talking to a sibling, do not step in.
23.  Do not make unnesesary noises.
24.  Make your bed every-day.
25 Brush your teeth every-day
26.  Do not mess up the house.
27.  Do not Insult your siblings.
28.  Do not steal

Our Family

After I took this picture, Rose wrote her (long) name all across the top in black marker.  She is very proud of being selected to share about her family with the preschool class next week. 

Product Recall: Bumbo Baby Seats

Before, the seats were recalled because there wasn't a warning label on the seat to prevent stupid parents from putting the chair on high countertops and wondering why the children fell.  Now, the seats have to be recalled because parents are too stupid to realize when their children are too thin for the chair and can fall out.

Really.

We've used our Bumbo and were happy with it.  In fact, all our children before the Bumbo couldn't sit up no matter what you did until the age of about 10 months.  With the Bumbo, you can pretend they have this skill. 



This was my thinnest child at 6 months.

As you might surmise from the picture of Woodjie Pumpkin, our children start out extremely fat.  The Bumbo was sooo perfect for Woodjie.  Only problem was, when you'd try to pick him up, the Bumbo would be stuck.  Woodjie and Rose actually stretched the Bumbo out a bit.  If they were thin and there was too much space in the chair, I wouldn't use it!

All children are different.  I wish all parents had some common sense, though...

Bye-Bye, Tree.

My computer just died.  Won't even power up.  All my computer-saved tree-ly good pictures of my fave tree are gone.  Ah, well, here's a random shot of it through my kitchen window.  It will have to do.  The tree started becoming hollow up under, bark began to fall off and branches were dying.  The whole tree was in the dying process for a while, but I'm sure the hot, drought-y weather did it no favours, either.  So it was time to go before it fell and did some major damage.

Not the sort of thing you just do yourself, though.  The tree is absolutely immense.  I could squat down and take a picture straight up even from this angle, and the tree will still be up up up there.  We had to hire the professionals at Prentice and Bush to come out and do the job.  Jason climbs up the tree like a spider with nothing but a rope and a pair of spiky cleats.  He takes a chainsaw and a drink along, but it's almost like watching Avatar to see him scurrying about so high up.

A view from my driveway.  The tree branches are halfway down in this picture.  This picture does not give the size of my tree justice.  The websites I've encountered say "mature" pin oak trees are 70 feet tall, and the ones I have left on the side of my house are about that, but this one was a bit taller and closer to 90 feet. (I am guessing that 70 feet is an average and not a world record.)   Oddly only the trees on the west side of my house remain.  Others got sick or were dying and had to be removed over the years.  They would probably have been planted in 1964 when the house was built.

The bad thing about having to have this work done is now I have an in-your-face view of 1960's power wires, complete with squirrel nest and some glass-looking doodads.  Sometimes the squirrels electrocute themselves to death because they keep running about on the wires, but that doesn't stop the stupid things from building the same old nests year after year.  Kind of like the let's build a condo on the Florida coast mentality.  Whenever they do this, we lose power for a while.

Speaking of losing power, most of our town was in total darkness overnight because of a very large and sudden thunderstorm.  The silence during the outage was just amazing.  You never realize how much electrical humming and other noise is about you until it is hushed.  Our area was one of the very last to be up and running power-wise, so sleepy children had to find ways to light their way in the morning and stay safe.  Jason had been telling me when he bid our job that really, things were slow, they could sure use the work, etc.  I'm so glad the tree came down just before the big storm hit.  Right now, all the local tree service people are going to be VERY busy for a while.  Just saw six tree trucks going up and down our street doing work today.  Meanwhile, my newly-trimmed trees have just been rained upon so it's perfect timing.