Summertime Blues

It has been a long time since I last wrote. I could blame it on the fact that it is now summer and I have all four children home with me and spend a great deal of time caring for and spending time with them (which really is partly to blame). But the truth of the matter is that I just can't think of anything worth taking the time to write about (or that someone would want to take the time to read!). I do not have the talent of making seemingly small things still amusing and witty (like Ilene!) so I just keep putting it off. However, my husband and oldest son are at the ward Fathers and Sons outing and everyone else is in bed so I decided to stop procrastinating and try to compose some of the small happenings going on here in the Hansen Household. Hopefully, then, the guilty feeling I get every time I read Ilene's blog will cease for a short while.

I decided to try out an idea I found on-line for keeping the kids excited and happy about helping around the house during the summer. It is sort of like a camp, but we don't really run it like that. Basically we plan certain fun activities to do each day when the kids finish their routines and chores in the morning and give rewards for their help so that they can earn small prizes and things. The only thing that we have done to make it sort of campy is to have a way for the kids to earn a sleep out in the family room. We did it once already and the kids loved it so that now I just have to remind them that they are trying to earn another fun night of games, stories, treats and movies in the family room and they shape right up and pitch in. This last week we were really busy spending time with family so things started to fall apart with all of our running around and Hannah said that we needed to get the house picked up so we could get it back to feeling like it did last week. It was nice to know that they could tell the difference and wanted to have the other type of home. I mean, it is hard to tell that your kids don't like living like pigs when they throw their garbage on the ground as nonchalantly as we throw ours in the garbage can, refuse to change out of their favorite clothes even when they are filthy, regularly trash their rooms (in a short amount of time) so that you can barely glimpse the floor, etc. You get the idea. It was just nice to know that they could feel a difference in the atmosphere of our home when things were more orderly and we were spending more time together. I found the time spent together helped me to appreciate the great kids I have rather than viewing them as mess makers and loud voices full of whining and demands. I am actually enjoying my kids more now. That was not something I was expecting from spending MORE time together. Before I always found that I needed to get away from them for a couple hours in order to enjoy that feeling!

However, talking about the camp out in the family room reminds me of the utter chaos we had that night. I had decided that we would just roast hot dogs and marshmallows over the grill to keep with the whole camp theme and was looking forward to this easy to prepare and clean-up meal. Well, I realized that we didn't have any hot dogs and so needed to go and get some. Paul was busy re-roofing our house that week and ran out of materials and so needed to run into Tri-Cities (45 or so min. away) and get more supplies, but he would be late getting home. Well, I thought that eating later would be okay since we were letting the kids stay up late and party anyway so I asked him to just get the few things we needed while he was in town so that I wouldn't have to load everyone up and go into Mattawa (where you pay an arm and a leg to get anything). He called up when he was at the store to get a refresher of what he was supposed to get so everything I felt that everything was going well . . . until he came home without the hot dogs! Luckily we had three ratty old hot dogs that I figured wouldn't kill anyone to eat so the kids could roast those and I could cook a few hamburgers to make up the difference. I turn on the grill and throw on the hamburgers and then I leave to go round up the crew who were all very busy and seemed as though they couldn't care less about food. I go back to flip the hamburgers and find that our grill had run out of propane! So now I drag everything back into the house to cook it. I throw the burgers on a frying pan and turn it on high so that I can cook everything fast (I mean Paul didn't get home until after 6 and I was trying to hurry here.) I run out to tell Paul that everything should be ready soon and to please bring in the kids. I get distracted, however, because Paul had just crashed his remote control airplane into the corn field by our house and wanted to tell me about it. We are talking for a while and then I remember the hamburgers and realize the noise that I have been hearing in the distance is the fire alarms going off in our house! I tell Paul to round up the kids and dash into the house to find charcoal burgers and a kitchen thick with smoke. So now I am rushing around opening windows and trying to get the alarms to turn off! I tell you, this simple meal just wore me out! Everything went pretty smoothly after that but I had no energy to present the meal in a nice or attractive way and I couldn't really get into a campy spirit cooking hot dogs and marshmallows over the stove in our kitchen so the meal was much more low key than originally planned. However, the rest of the night went smoothly and was lots of fun except for story time which took almost an hour to read 3 stories because each kid seemed to want to comment or ask a question after what seemed like every sentence! Needless to say, the kids didn't get into their sleeping bags with a movie playing until 10 o'clock. Next time I am not mixing dinner and camping out. It is too stressful to have such simple fun!

Other than that there really hasn't been anything happening and all my thoughts seem to be focused on the house and kids activities which leaves me feeling pretty low on the blogging ideas. I feel kind of in a whirl some days. Yesterday and last night provided some excitement in the form of a near drowning of my baby and an attack of croup in my oldest daughter, but I think I will save those stories for another blog. This one is already long and boring enough. It is only ten but my brain feels like it shut off around 2 or 3 this afternoon so I apologize for the non-creativity of it. Maybe I can make the drowning sound really dramatic when I blog about it. Don't hold your breath though. I never think that it is going to be long between blogs and then I realize that weeks have gone by and I haven't done a thing. But due to having all four kids at home I definitely make no promises for better behavior in the future!



This has nothing to do with any of the things I just wrote about but it is one of my new favorite pictures and I just wanted to share. My little Mozart-in-the-Making!