But sometimes tools must be used. Like when Mama finds the coolest family Christmas present ever. And it involves assembly. And installation. From the ceiling.
For years now I have wanted an indoor swing. Long before I had kids to justify the purchase. But this year I had the perfect excuse. JoJo! JoJo loves to swing. In fact, swing was one of JoJo's first recognizable words and it is one of the few things that seems to calm down his crazy hyper little body. I did some research and found a few hanging swings. But then I knew we would have the problem of the kids fighting over who got to swing. With six kids I have to anticipate what will cause the most chaos and what will contain it. So I either need six hanging swings or....
the mother of all hanging swings--the Hugglepod!!!
Is this the coolest thing you've ever seen or what??? It was the coolest thing I'd ever seen and I thought it was the PERFECT fit for our family. But now we had to figure out where it would fit in our house which is not exactly huge. We have 3 bedrooms--one for girls, one for boys, one for grown-ups and whoever is sick tonight. We used to have a dining room, but it had long ago been converted to the playroom. We decided to hang it from a beam in there. Why not hang it outside as pictured here? Well, in the winter its too rainy and in the summer its hot as Hades. So we ordered the Hugglepod (thank you Jim and Kathleen) and I told Brian it absolutely had to be hung before Christmas morning or it would not have the impact I wanted for those early morning photo ops.
Dutifully, he went out 2 days before Christmas and bought the supplies he would need to hang the pod--some chain, an eye hook, a swivel thingamajig, etc, etc. Then on Christmas Eve at about 9pm he started hanging the coolest present ever. But quickly we discovered he had not purchased the right pieces. The clip that would attach the pod to the chain was too small. Another reason that my husband probably hates home improvement projects is that he has never in the history of home improvement managed to come home with all the right supplies to finish a project.
This project was no different. I should have anticipated this.
We started to scrounge around the garage for make shift supplies so that we could at least finish the project enough to get through Christmas. Brian thought he had found something way on a top shelf. He was in a hurry (and very irritated by now) so instead of grabbing the step stool to reach that very high shelf, he stood on a broken piece of furniture that very quickly became even more broken. It collapsed under the his weight and he turned over on top of his ankle. I thought he probably had broken it for sure. But no, just a sprain. On Christmas Eve. HoHoHo!
Well, long story short, we found a replacement part, Brian hung the Hugglepod, we got to bed about 2am, and just as I had hoped and dreamed...my kids LOVE it! Brian's limp is getting better. The swelling has gone down and his toes are not so blue.
Daddy saved Christmas!
The other really cool present we got for the kids was this teeter totter.
It requires no assembly and it can be ridden by one kid or three. It would be very hard to get hurt taking this out of the box and putting it on the ground. We'd probably better stick with more toys like this next year :)
