Merry Christmas!!

Christmas setup mayhem

So the pre-lit tree setup this year has been delightful!  We pulled it out,  set it all up and plugged it in.  Most of the tree wasn't lit.  Karl spent several hours down in the floor with a multimeter and got one strand mostly happy.

 I jiggled a plug and the top portion popped on,  but still left with a chunk gone.  It was after 11pm,  so we found 3 strands of working white lights and flung them up on the tree.  It is far from perfect,  but for tonight it'll do. Maybe tomorrow I'll get a strand of colored ones to help it blend in.

I added some of the first round of ornaments when Karl yelped for help.

 He was trying to fix the glasses Emily had just broken in the center, snapping them in half, and managed to glue his fingers together when the super glue exploded.  I got him freed with 100% acetone, and he is back working on repairs.

 After he patches the glasses,  he is going to fix the broken stocking hanger, and the 4 broken pieces on the Christmas village.  These are definitely first world problems,  and I'm going to stop complaining now!

Soapy fail

A gallon of laundry detergent spilled on the floor is nasty business.  After a quick google search I am opting for the kitty litter method.  Sadly it is under the machine.  No clue how to best get that out without pulling it out which I'm not gonna do.  Argh. Welcome to Monday.  And what do I do with the towels I stared soaking up all this mess!  They are gonna be fun to put through the machine.

Let it Snow!

First snowfall equals cocoa, marshmallows and homemade cookies!

Josh just now-"I need ice to cool ym hot cocoa down.  Wait,  is it supposed to be hot?"

Awesome Halloween costumes

Despite the fact that Karl seems to utterly  dislike Halloween,  I absolutely adore it!  I love costumes,  as long as they are creative and/or adorable.  We don't do scary at my house.

So this year I made the girls their choice of costumes, a vampire for Sydney, and Mavis from Hotel Transylvania for Emily.  She was a vampire mid way into turning into her bat self.

Josh wanted to be Bumblebee the transformer so I bought his.  I had grand plans to make hima transforming car costume, but reality kicked in and I scraped that idea.

I was Snow White, from theTV show Once Upon a Time.  No one got my costume, but I think everyone should wear a cape and awesome boots.  It's very fun!

We actually carved real pumpkins this year. Um,  ewwwwwww! Pumpkin guts are nasty!  But it was fun to use a chisel on a pumpkin.

Awkward Halloween

That awkward moment Halloween morning as you're dropping off your late child at school and you see someone in the school building wearing a bathrobe looking like she has a blackeye and you don't know whether that's a Halloween costume or her normal appearance but since you're wearing a pajama top and fuzzy slippers you can't really say anything.

Water pump sensor error

Clearly we need to consider putting in a bathroom in the basement.  Our genius sin decided to pee into the sump pump closet, because he was playing in the basement and didn't want to run upstairs.  Apparently we hadn't told him the water closet we have is just not that kind of closet!

Never thought we'd need to spell that out,  we found out because he set off the emergency water sensors we put in place to warn us of floods.