10 and a HALF

Eric and Carissa spent the time between Christmas and New year with us. Amongst the hard stuff - there was cute stuff too. The "10 and a half" was cute. But wait. Let me start with the hard stuff and move to cute.

When we got the children, we picked up problems on day 1. Cream Puff apparently doesn't "DO" bedtimes. So, you may ask, what  DOES she do? Well apparently, she goes to her room when she is ready to retire, locks the door, and leaves the little ones to amuse themselves until they fall over. "Falling over time" for Carissa seems to be a 1 am in the morning. Sounds like child abuse to me.
SO... this presented boundary problems in our house - because our house rules say - bedtime - at 8pm, latest 9 pm during holidays. We bashed heads a few nights over this issue with them, until they came over to our way of thinking. Ha - more because we stopped naming the time - than because we were so clever. LOL.

The 2nd problem had me feeling like a class A witch. Eric is a very bad eater. He looks at food and decides: I don't eat that. Mostly I ignore him and get on with life, but one particular evening, when Werner had made lovely food that the kids all loved, it stuck in my craw. He would not even taste it. I looked across the table and said quietly: Eric if you don't eat that, you are not getting pudding either.
He looked at me with big beautiful eyes that said: O - I have heard that one before. My mommy threatens me with that all the time.

Dinner dragged to a close, with his plate being untouched. We cleared the table, and took out 1 pudding bowl too little. Those big eyes turned to disbelief as we had pudds and he had none. Later that evening, he told Cream Puff about it - I didn't get any pudding because I didn't eat my food. Don't know what Cream Puff told him, but in an attempt to get sympathy from her, he told her- and daddy doesn't put me in bed nicely every evening.

Werner threw his toys out the cot at that one. He told Eric to stop talking nonsense to his mother.

Well, the up side of the story is that after that episode - he tried to eat at least some of the food we prepared.

Now the 10 and a half. It began with Eric. He started to use it as a phrase for everything denoting "much". Eric would you like to go swimming - yes - like 10 and a half.
Eric, are you hungry -like 10 and a half. (Which of course is most of the time since he doesn't do our food!)

We now have a new and precious expression to add to our collection: 10 and a half.

Want to end off with that. I am typing this blog from work on  the first day of my NEW job! I wrote a while back - that I was making some life changes. SARS is a thing of the past. Now I think I can say - this new place is nice, very NICE - like 10 and a half!