Kids...

On our Saturday Thanksgiving we got treated to a John Denver concert... Jim's mom loves John Denver so some relatives organized a little concert for her. Maybe I shouldn't say little--10 people and they played/sang for two hours! It was really nice. Above is Jim's cousin, Thomas, who played with them.

So, we've decided there is no easy way around it... Carsten IS going to cost us money. Friday night was quite cold here so we turned on our gas fireplace as nice as you please. Jim went upstairs to work out on the elliptical and I was on the computer downstairs with both boys. I noticed that it smelled like burning plastic so I got up and moved the plastic fence we had put in front of the fireplace... went back to the computer. A few minutes later I looked over and there seemed to be smoke. Now this is a gas fireplace with fake logs, you can't get into it, it shouldn't smoke. I quickly turned it off and told Reese to go tell daddy that the fireplace was smoking. I opened a couple of windows and waited for Jim. He came rushing down and we racked our brains for what could be wrong. Well, lo and behold if Carsten hadn't put four plastic spoons in the top of the fireplace! Lovely day... we had four plastic puddles of goo oozing and smoking toxic plastic smoke into our house... Nice. Jim started taking the thing apart and scraping off as much plastic as he could. We opened ALL the windows (mind you we had turned on the fireplace because it was so cold out in the first place) and let in the 29 degree, um cold. I bundled the kids in coats and we froze while Jim worked. We are still not sure if we'll ever turn on the fireplace again.