Be careful what you threaten!

First of all, it's Jan!  For me, that means break out the saws and start tearing apart your least favorite room.  This always helps me get through Jan. without getting the wintertime, after Christmas- blues.    I have loved the front room for 8 years now but it was time for a change.  I am going to show my progress each week.  hopefully in 3, it will be done.  Right now I am working on 2 corner shelves that are mostly just for looks since they can't hold much.  I found the doors at DI and 2 of them have glass in them, so I was excited about that. 

 My title has to do with my child named Ian.  A good friend of mine told me that I needed to put this on my blog because it's one of those things to remember in later years.  Ian headed passed by me on Thurs. at dusk, with his bow and arrows in hand.  He just got a new set of 6 arrows for Christmas that were very expensive (cause apparently there are no 'cheap' arrows out there.)  I told him that there was no way he was going out to shoot them at that time of day because there is no way he would be able to find them.  He was very determined that this would not be an issue.  I tried a few different things to talk him out of it and finally just said, "OK, for every arrow that you lose, that will be one day of no playing with Josh and earning $10 per day to pay me off".  I really thought THIS would put a stop to his brain.  But no, he said "fine" and went out.  10 min. later he came back in looking kind of white.  I said, "How many did you lose?"  "5"  was the response.  He immediately searched for every flashlight in the house and took Isaac and Alicia out to look with him.  They came in with nothing.  We decided that he would be late for school the next day and would go out and look for them when it got light.  I got up and went out with him thinking it would not be that hard to find them once it was light.  We found nothing!  He went to school bawling and I proceeded through my day in a very bad mood myself.  My thoughts were, "How am I going to survive Ian for 5 days if he doesn't have Josh?  And "Why did I spout off consequences that were a little too harsh for the crime."  My VT came and I explained to them my dilemma and also told them that the next step for Ian would be to go to Mario and Mario is a big softy when it comes to Ian.  The process would have been Ian starts crying, Mario says he will talk to mean, cruel mom and then he comes and uses his lawyer skills on me until nothing that I thought I knew makes sense anymore, and I start crying and change all the punishments into nothing and go find Ian to give him a hug.  So, I decided to avoid this whole step and Ian and I had a talk when he came home and I told him that he could choose 2 days out of the 5 to play with Josh but he would still have to earn money everyday and not play with him on 3 of the days.  So, the above picture is Ian still having Josh and Co. in his life and finding a lot of happiness.

AJ signed up to be a prince up at USU for all the 3-4 yr. old girls in the valley.  He claimed that it would look great on his resume.  From the pics- it looks like there could be other reasons too? 

Audrey just said, "Mom, put on there about my big party last night so that people won't think I'm a loser."