will WE play in Peoria?

We welcomed the new year like so many people… by recovering from the night before. Not because we drank too much. Because we had a party.

Including us, there were 12 adults and 10 children here. That’s a lot in this house. The kids mostly stuck to the playroom in the basement, which they left in the appropriate stage of disorder. I didn’t let the other parents make their kids pick up… I tell Kaitlyn two things: that’s her room to do with what she wants and if you invite friends over to a party you don’t expect them to clean up at the end. (Although someone did clean up Kaitlyn’s room upstairs, leaving it in better shape than it had started the evening.)

One person brought over some fireworks that he’d had leftover from Bastille day. A little before midnight, all the men went in the backyard to watch him set them off. Good thing there isn’t a house in the lot just below us… and that the neighbors we do have didn’t complain about the noise.

Then our friends who’ve lived here for 12 years or so taught us a traditional French way to ring in the new year. Never mind the champagne. You buy boxes of party supplies at the store… with hats and streamers and noisemakers… and… tubes that you load with tightly packed paper balls to blow at your friends and family. I nearly got beamed in the eye with one fast moving ball and it hurt! The grown ups were the ones trying to hit each other with the little blow tube thingies. The kids were content to just blow the noise makers. It was quite a sight. We’ll probably be finding those little balls in corners of the house for weeks.

After unloading and reloading the dishwasher, avoiding vacuuming and generally goofing off…. we finally headed to the basement to clean up that mess. The kids had proudly showed off how they had gathered every toy downstairs and dumped it all in a pile in the corner. I still don’t really understand why. But I do know it was a horrible mess to pick up. They poured all the monkeys out of the barrel… all the pieces of a puzzle… every polly pocket shoe… every doll…. it was horrible. But was was more horrible was the pile of wood on the floor. Sometime in the middle of the night, part of our ceiling collapsed! We’d noticed it sagging last night, but had no idea it was so close to just falling like that. For those who haven’t seen it, the ceiling is some thin boards like you’d use to panel a wall. Turns out, they were barely tacked up. The tiny nails used to hang the boards had pulled out and the wood fell out. We are really lucky that it didn’t fall when all the kids were down there playing! Bill drilled screws into the boards that didn’t fall to hold them up. I have enough excuses not to get on the treadmill, I don’t need the fear of being clobbered by my own house added to the list!

So, happy new year, landlord. A whole new problem to tackle in 2009!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.