Sunday Reflections 9/23/2012

With everyone home, there seems to be a lot more messes than usual.  Here's a small sample of ONE day's messes.  See if you can match the messmaker with the mess.

The messes:

#1

#2

#3

#4

The messmakers:

 

A:  Kenzie
 

 

B:  Jake



C:  The Bradinator

D.  Our friendly neighborhood bear

And the answers are (drumroll please)

#1.  B.  Jake is a watermelon fiend.  Jake emptied an entire cookie sheet full of watermelon, by himself, within minutes of waking up that Monday morning.

#2.  C.  Brad working on a little project in the garage.  Never putting his tools away until the end of the job, when one is found missing at some crucial juncture, yells, screams, curses, blaming it always on the children.  Although in his defense they are occassionally found in the yard or on top of his truck.  Yes, Jake does have an afinity for hiding Brad's favorite phillips screw driver from Riley (don't know why) on the top of the cab of his truck.  Luckily, it usually rolls off the cab into the bed of his truck with a loud thump while he drives down the road so he knows Jake has been stashing tools again.

#3  D.  Our friendly, neighborhood black bear working over the garbage can, AGAIN.  This has become a great annoyance for Brad because the garbage cans now live in the garage, which Brad views as an encroachment of his personal garage space.

#4.  A.  Kenzie.  Five minutes after cleaning the watermelon mess, Hurricane McKenzie passes through leaving a path of destruction; crumbs, bananas and peanut butter, strewn all over the kitchen counter.  Brad claims that making the bed in the morning is a waste of time because it only gets messed up again at night.  Maybe he is right and I should apply this philosophy to my kitchen.  The kids mess it up faster than I can clean it.  So why bother?  Oh yeah, the mice.

We celebrated Riley's 7th birthday this last week.  Trying to be frugal, not much was spent on the birthday budget.  The kids, wanting to do their part, created their own gifts for Riley.

From Jake, a favorite toy was selected from his hoard and gifted to his older brother.

Kenzie got creative with a craft book making this:

It's a sea serpent suspended with wire (taken without permission from her father's wire stash in the garage) so that when you move the box, the serpent appears to be swimming. 

Jordan carved Riley a coyote out of wood, fashioned him a belt out of an old bicycle chain and gave him an old multi-tool to go with the cool motorcyle-esque belt.

All impressive gifts.

However, my personal favorite gifts came from Ben.   Our best little builder insists on crafting everything out of wood.  EVERYTHING.

Hieroglyphic interpretation:  Ben + Riley, (BFF painted on the back)  Not sure what purpose he intended for the block other than a written monument of his devotion.  Maybe it could be used as a paperweight?

But wait, that's not all...Oh, no.

That's a bat (he thought it would be wise to label it) and a ball to play baseball with.  A wooden bat (of course) and a ball.  A WOODEN ball, as in a piece of wood carved round and painted white to serve as the other half of the bat and ball set.  Ben has a masterful ability to craft anything he can imagine out of wood scrounged from the yard. 

As for the cake...well, I had some techinical difficulties.  After three tries I finally created this masterpiece:

Just to have this happen five minutes after I took it out of the freezer:  

I served it up before it it split in two potentially swallowing one of the pirates into its icing depths.  Though the fault line down the middle was an eyesore it still tasted great and Riley didn't even notice.