A haunted house?

There is always a lot of confusion in our house after church. We walk in, Sunday shoes and clothes start flying and everyone starts crying for lunch. It is feeding time at the zoo and the animals can get testy. Once everyone is fed and watered and have retired to their respective dens, I start cleaning up.

Well, today was no different. It was quiet upstairs as everyone had retreated downstairs. How typical...when there's work to do. As I was in the kitchen, I heard something hit the floor and turning around toward the sound I saw something amazingly terrifying. A toy without a child nearby. One of the bathtub toys was laying just outside the bathroom door as if it had been thrown out of the bathroom. I stood there motionless....which doesn't happen often... wondering how the toy had come flying out of the bathroom on it's own. I dismissed it and went about my work, but I kept seeing it out of the corner of my eye. Luke and I have been enjoying playing lots of "hide and go seek" in the house every day and one of his favorite places is in the bathtub. I slowly walked into the bathroom fully expecting to see him standing there with a big grin on his face. Nothing. The room was empty, as was the entire upstairs.

After I got the kitchen cleaned up, the incident just kept gnawing at me. I went downstairs and found Sean. I cleared the room of little ears and told him that the weirdest thing just happened. As I explained that I saw a toy come flying out of an unoccupied bathroom, he smiled and said, "No dear. The toy was down here in the office and I threw it upstairs. You must have heard it hit the wall and saw it laying on the floor outside the door."

Sean just looked at me, grinned, and said, "Blogger material."

Holiday confusion...solved.

Hello all. I know it's been a while since you've heard anything interesting about happenings at "the zoo," and believe me it's not because the "animals" are exceptionally good these days. No. In fact, it is simply that the "keeper" has been exceptionally busy.

Connor has been really confused these days about the holidays this time of year. At school, they have been studying how different people celebrate. The school prepared us for the fact that they would be studying Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, one that I didn't even recognize, and Christmas. One day he came home doing Kwanzaa dancing and wanted me to play the bongo drums for him while he danced. Another day he came home saying, "Then they all sit around and drink a warm drink in honor of their ancestors and play with a cradle." He then proceeded to tell me the name/meaning of a few of the Hebrew symbols on the "cradle."

While the purpose of these lessons was for political correctness, it certainly gave me a wonderful teaching opportunity. The boys are very familiar with the true meaning of Christmas and the reason God came to earth in human form. Now, they are acutely aware that there are people in the world who do not understand or accept the greatest gift we will ever receive. The gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. Don't leave Christ out of your Christmas holiday season. Merry Christmas!

Slicker than snot!

I know it has been forever since we have blogged! But that's just the way it's gonna be sometimes, so get used to it people! LOL...

Okay. So I leave last night for a conference in Fargo today. Spend the night, do the conference, and head straight back. I get home a couple of hours ago. Connor meets me at the garage door and says, "Daddy! Luke sprayed the stuff in the holes on the TV. In the big holes AND the little holes!" Of course, this is Greek to me and I am wondering what in the heck is going on. Regardless of the details, I KNOW it ain't good. SO I walk in to find Luke sitting in his bed, sobbing loudly, saying "Daddy.... I did something sooooo baaaaaad today and it's really baaaad." I'm thinking... "Ok. so my big screen has been spray painted!" I calmly walk downstairs to find Kelly, also sobbing, sitting on the floor in front of the big screen, armed with Qtips and rubbing alcohol. I come to find out that, as usual, Luke grabbed one of the compressed air cans and was playing with it.... or so he thought. What he actually grabbed was a can of spray silicon! And he proceeded to spray the walls... all the pictures in my office... the CARPET... my TV screen... and even the audio/video connectors on the front of the TV (Connor's "big holes and little holes")... Of course, that stuff was generally able to be cleaned off the pictures, the TV casing, and TV screen, and it seems that those audio/video connectors still work... but we still have this stuff on our carpet and walls in the office. In other words, we basically have grease stains all over the walls and carpet now. The carpet can be cleaned if we rent one of those carpet cleaners. However, only alcohol really gets it clean, especially on hard surfaces like the walls. Of course the walls are painted in latex, so as soon as we use alcohol to clean these spots off the wall, we will take the paint off too. So what would you do? Leave the stains (which you can really only see when the light hits them a certain way), or clean them and have to re-paint the entire room?

Welcome to the daily decisions that must be made in the McKay Wildlife Preserve....

The Beasts are on the loose...

...so I'm driving home yesterday at around 5:15 and, pulling up to my driveway, I see Connor, Luke, and their friend Nathaniel playing in our front yard. They are actually enjoying raking the leaves! "Great!" I think, as I then see Nathaniel and Luke begin walking across the street to our neighbor's pile of leaves. Nathaniel with a shovel, and Luke with a rake, proceed to scoop up leaves from my neighbor's yard and start walking to my front yard. I stop the car and say, "Boys? What are you doing?" To which Nathaniel says, "We're just making a pile of leaves and we want a really big pile!" Of course I say, "Guys! Don't drag leaves from other yards into mine!" But Nathaniel just keeps walking! I say "stop" three more times as he continues to look at me as he walks to my yard with the shovel full of leaves. I finally have to stop the car in the middle of my street, get out, and walk directly to my children to get them to stop dumping the leaves o' the neighborhood into my yard! But it was my error... I forgot that the animal kingdom doesn't understand English.... and besides, they were probably just nesting... In the meantime, I guess I have begun a yard raking service for the rest of the neighborhood... wonder if I can make any money doing it.

...so I am walking into my house, and I tell Kelly how maddening the "leaf incident" was, and she says, "Want to get REAL mad? Come look at this." She leads me to the floor beside our (relatively new) couch, where we had recently put down a new bed for our OTHER beasts of the house (Max and Butch the beagles), and shows me about a three-inch diameter hole they had chewed in the upholstery on the side of the couch at the bottom! We now have the decision of leaving it blaringly damaged, patching it with non-matching fabric, or tearing up one of the couch's throw-pillows to use some of its matching upholstery fabric.

...and as we are walking back to the kitchen, simply laughing because there's really no other mentally healthy option at this point, Mitch comes walking up the stairs completely naked. Kelly simply says in a tone of utter defeat and learned helplessness, "That's at least the 10th time today he's done that. But it has been a good day... at least he hasn't pee'd on anything yet."