"My Crazy Kids"

Moving Again . . . By Allan Olson Once again the weekend was filled with moving boxes, appliances, couches and all the rest of the things associated with the moving process. It seems like only yesterday that we were doing this, and now most of the family was together again going through the same process we did just over a month before. Thankfully, this time it wasn’t me going through the process. I wasn’t the one funding all the trips to the hardware store for supplies; I was just grunt labor, not grunt labor and checkbook. This time we were moving my brother into his house. The kids were excited to go to Uncle Brian’s new house. Or maybe they were just excited to play with his little dog, the crazy little mutt that all the nieces and nephews love. In the house, a few treasures remained, left by the previous owners. Alivia found one of those treasures – a small Ukulele – and proceeded to serenade Grandpa and other family members with her ABCs while strumming the ...

Babysitting By Allan Olson Recently I had the privilege of “babysitting” my three youngest children all by myself. I use this term even though my wife informs me that they are my children, so it’s not babysitting. In addition to that, all of my children declare that they are no longer babies. They were babies a long time ago. Regardless, I’m the dad, and I needed to watch my kids. Wake-up time My plan was to sleep in; I wasn’t going in to work and I had hoped – foolishly, perhaps – that maybe, just maybe, I could sleep past 6:30 a.m. Well, I was wrong. They didn’t let me sleep in. I even tried the old “turn the television on with cartoons in my room” trick in an effort to catch a few more winks. Well, that didn’t work so well, either. If they weren’t fighting, or playing (on me, on the bed), they were crowding me out of my king bed and trying to hog the blankets. Crazy, I thought. Three small kids can take up enough room to make me leave my bed. And all this time ...

Kids Helping By Allan Olson It never seems to fail – when you want your kids to help with something around the house, they always try to get away from it. And then there are those times when you really don’t want them to help . . . Last weekend, thanks to a malfunctioning dishwasher, I was forced to do dishes the hard way – by hand. I remember washing dishes as a kid. I never liked it then, and I still don’t like it. However, it is a necessary evil, so I went ahead with the intent of teaching my oldest son, Nikolai, that part of the eating process involves cleaning up afterward, including washing the dishes. There were at least a couple of problems in the process. I will take the blame for the first. I wanted to get the job done, and I didn’t want to mess around. Nikolai didn’t really want to help, but knew he had to. I started washing. Then he decided he wanted to wash instead of rinse. I didn’t have the patience to let him do that process for long. Remember – I wanted to get the job ...

Home Ownership By Allan Olson It’s been a month since we took possession of this big place we now call home. In the time leading up to it, we knew there were some repairs that needed to be done, just from the walk-through with the realtor. To what extent, we thought we had a good idea, but some of those repairs have resulted in more work and many trips to town just to get the right part that we thought we got the last time. At our old place, a trip to town was only a few minutes, and it was no big deal to run to town several times a day because something was forgotten on the last trip. Our home is now 20 miles from the nearest town, and a quick trip to town and back takes no less than an hour, if hitting any stores is involved. The first weekend was the worst for trips to town. We got started on one project but ran into a snag, and so had to go to work on another project while someone ran to town to get what was needed to fix the first problem. That weekend I l...

Catching A Bear By Allan Olson As we (Abigail and I) gazed out our new kitchen window and looked at the big yard still to be explored, we started discussing some of the things we can do in the yard. Since there is still over two feet of snow in the yard, we have no idea what lies underneath that white stuff that won’t go away; however, we started talking about the things she and her three siblings will be able to do once the snow starts disappearing. “You can’t go play in the water here,” I told her. “When the snow and ice melt we can,” she said. “Not here,” I replied. “It’s icky water.” At least it’s my understanding that what lies between the yard and the lake is a swamp. “You can’t go by the water without mommy or daddy,” I said. She agreed, solemnly nodding her head. “You also can’t play in the woods without us, either,” I said. “Daddy or mommy will explore the woods with you.” “It’s not hunting season,” Abigail said. “We can’t shoot deer.” “That’s right,...