A Much Needed Vacation and House Winterizing

Wow, people are already starting to send Christmas letters (via e-mail)? I’m really not on top of things this year. My goal is to get all the Christmas gifts in the mail today – after running around all week like a chicken with my head cut off trying to finish making, wrapping, and packaging all the presents, and printing a family photo for each of the grandparents. At least that will feel good to get done. We were thinking of going to cut down a Christmas tree at one of the Christmas tree farms nearby today, but if the temperatures stay in the teens today, I don’t think that would be a very fun outing with all of the kids. Michael’s at the temple now, and when he gets home I’m going to go. That will be nice – we’re trying to be better at going, even if we have to take turns like this, so we marked our calendar each month so we won’t accidentally get too busy. Oh, and Michael is now on a week of vacation, which I would say is a ‘much needed’ week for him and for me. Work has been pretty busy for him, and I’ve been allowing myself to stress just a little too much over all this Christmas stuff – I usually get it all done in October or November, so getting stuff in the mail midway through December is not my norm. The boys are being really cute right now – they turned on some of the demo songs on the digital piano (right now a pretty somber sounding organ song is playing), and they are running circles around the house to the music. Michael and I decided this week that we are going to move all the storage stuff out of the main room of the basement, somehow put something up to block off the exposed water meter in one corner, and put out the climbing toys that I got for the basement – even if we can’t finish the ceilings and put carpeting in right now, it’s kind of silly to have all of that wasted space while the kids are more cooped up in the winter. We have some old rugs laid out on the floor down there, so it won’t just be cement, and I think they will really love it once we get it all set up. I think we’ll see if we can do it as a surprise for them for Christmas. Oh, and speaking of winter – we found out something we didn’t know about this house the other night. We got a little snow storm, probably around 4 inches of snow or so), and Michael and Kolby shoveled the driveway that night while I went to the store. When I got home, I couldn’t get the minivan up the shoveled driveway. After lots of trying, we finally had to have Michael push while we inched and slid all the way up. Then yesterday I couldn’t get it up when I went to pick up the babysitter, so she and I had to carry the boys up the driveway from the van. Our driveway has a bit of an incline, but you really wouldn’t think it would be that bad. We got some ice melt stuff, so we’ll see if that helps any. I was able to get up it when we got home last night by coming up fast on the opposite side of the driveway and curving around (although that hadn’t worked the night before). So, hopefully the salt will be enough to do the trick. Oh, the joys of winterizing a house. Oh, and I think I’ve figured out what to do with the space heaters. My dad explaining to me that it wouldn’t be a very difficult job to move the thermostat down to the basement, (so that the space heaters upstairs wouldn’t throw off the thermostat temperature and not allow it to turn on when the temperature drops in the basement, possibly causing the pipes to freeze). But then he suggested that if the electric bills are so much cheaper here than using the gas furnace, why not just get one more space heater and put it in the basement instead of using the furnace just to warm up the basement. That hadn’t even occurred to me. That will definitely save money. And there’s a good place to put the space heater down there in the laundry room near the furnace so it won’t be in danger of being bumped by the boys once we get their play room set up. And who knows, we may need to use the furnace some of the time when it gets colder, but so far we haven’t needed it since we got the space heaters. And yesterday it was in the high teens outside, and it stayed up at least at 65 degrees in the rooms where we were using the space heaters. So, I think this will be a good solution. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions on that!