"My Crazy Kids"

A warm geocaching weekend By Allan Olson With the weather in the 50s, it was hard to stay indoors on Sunday – so we didn’t! After all, winter is knocking on the door, and it could soon be -50, and nobody wants to be outside in that! To kick things off, the two boys both got sick. The old­est was first; it was at about 2 a.m. on Friday when he woke me up, so I went to clean the mess – likely my least favor­ite thing in the world. I would rather field dress a deer than deal with vomit. The next son came to us at about 4 a.m., shortly after I had fallen back asleep. “I’m sick,” he said. “Did you make a mess?” I asked. “No,” he said. “So you made it to the bathroom?” “Yes,” he said. “Good – go to the other room and sleep, and get a bucket.” He left the room and I rolled over and went back to sleep. After all, the alarm would be going off in less than two hours. Thankfully, by Friday eve­ning all the kids were feeling much better. On Saturday we spent the morning cleaning to get ready for...

A birthday weekend By Allan Olson This long weekend went by in a flash. With no school Thursday and Friday because of conferences, the kids were at home driving mom nuts. They were supposed to be cleaning their rooms and making preparations for our youngest child’s fifth birthday. Before I left for work on Friday, I informed the kids that if their rooms weren’t clean when I got back, their toys would go to a new home. Several hours later, I returned to find the rooms not cleaned – especially the girls’ room. I delayed as long as I could before carrying out my threatened punishment. I gave them more chances than I probably should have, but even that didn’t matter. The girls room was still a mess, and the rule was that both rooms needed be cleaned. While I might have been convinced to leave the boys’ toys in their room since they had their room mostly done, they let it be known that they were unhappy that I was taking anyone’s toys away, so I removed their toys as well. I hau...

A hunting weekend By Allan Olson On Saturday I was one of about 500,000 in the “Orange Army” hoping to be lucky enough to harvest a mighty whitetail and stock some venison in my freezer for the next year. I was really gung-ho and rarin’ to go on Saturday morning – until I got to my stand. I enjoy the thrill of the game and a successful hunt but, sitting in the stand until daylight, hoping to get lucky enough to draw a bead on an animal is really a boring game. You sit there and sit there, often all for naught. However, when a deer does make an appearance, all that waiting is quickly forgotten. Well, I’m going to be honest – I waited from about 7 a.m. until about 8:30 a.m. before I got my chance, and then I blew it. As the song from “Bananas at Large” goes, “My fingers were so frozen, I couldn’t pull the trigger.” My fingers were definitely getting cold, although I did manage to squeeze off a round (or three) before my prey disappeared in the brush. About seven minutes later i...

Road trip up north By Allan Olson It was another road trip this weekend; this time up north to Lake of the Woods to attend the confirmation of one my many awesome nieces. She sent the invitation to us last week, and after some discussion, we decided that we should attend this special event for her. We were awakened at 6:15 a.m. on Sunday (15 minutes prior to my alarm going off) by Alivia, with this announcement: “Daddy, it snowed!” Well, usually just a dusting of snow will get the kids excited, so I didn’t think anything of it. I went downstairs to start waking up the other children. When I glanced out the window, it certainly appeared to be more than just a little snow. Although it was still dark outside, I was going to give it the benefit of the doubt, at least until I opened a door to peer out. After I got sleepy bones Marcus out of bed, I did open the door and was very surprised – I was actually going to have to get the shovel out of the garage so the kids and ...

Another Long Day By Allan Olson In October of 2010, my first “Long Day” column was written about what was planned to be a simple trip to International Falls but ended up with a deer hitting our van, then the dryer we were hauling to get fixed tumbled off of the back of the trailer about 15 miles after the deer collision and, adding insult to injury, the washer on the load also suffered damage from the sudden stops along the way, thanks to other animals, rendering them both useless. Well, last Saturday was an­other “Long Day.” This one involved no deer collisions – thankfully – but instead in­cluded a whole host of other problems revolving around a “simple” tire change. On Friday night we de­cided we would participate in the Northstar Geoseekers highway cleanup in Bagley on Saturday, since we were heading there to visit a friend anyway. We were on the road by 9 a.m. on Saturday morn­ing. We made a few quick stops in town and then we were on our way. We had hoped to find some g...