A selection of dinnertime activities

Usually the bickering, the fidgeting, the in and out of seats, playing with food, etc gets to me. Some days, though, I have more capacity to appreciate the silliness that surrounds me. Today was one of those days. Here is some of what my kids did while I prepared and ate dinner. It is pretty typical stuff and was accompanied by the usual amount of bickering/fidgeting/playing/whining.

M and J planned a party, each inviting 3 friends, for saturday. They each made invitations for their friends.

Apparently, I served pasta kazoos for dinner. M and J performed a series of solos and duets with their penne whistles.

We had a master pretender contest to see who was the best at pretending. M conceded, declaring that she would not ever pretend again, except when her friends were over and they were playing with the doll house. J then found other (pretend) opponents.

Scripture reading became performance art. In an attempt to get them to listen I asked them to raise their hands when I read "my son" and to touch mouth, ear or eyes when they heard words like see/hear/speak etc. Before long they had actions for know/learn, voice, prayer/cry, love, Jesus, truth, night and on and on and on until at least every third word had an action.

Post-scripture reading M did a song and dance number about how much Jesus really loves us while J finally started eating his dinner and I washed dishes.

BB was not feeling well so he just ate dinner, then sat quietly playing with his trains while the rest of us "ate."

As Requested ...

Cute Little People

First Snow of the Season

Snowball fight, snow man (who didn't last long) and a very confused BB (what is all this white stuff?!!).

Electric Bill Update

The reading on the bill for October is 35671. Still short of the 35732 mark that they "read" last month.

Electric Bill

Our electric bill for September arrived and it seemed a bit high.

September wasn't a particularly hot or cold month, so the furnace and A/C weren't on much. And, Amanda might say that I'm a little excessive in my habit of turning lights off in empty rooms, so our electricity usage is generally pretty low. The historical data provided on the bill provides a bit more perspective:

Somehow, we appeared to have used more electricity in October than we had in August.  Concerned that this could somehow be accurate, I went out to the meter and was happy to see that it did not read 35,732+.  It was, in fact, 35,174, a difference of 558.

Ironically, considering the environmentalist forces at work today, when you use more than a certain level of electricity, the cost per kWh actually goes down, so, there may have been some financial incentive to not correct this reading; perhaps next month, the reading would show 35,733 and we'd only be charged for 1 kWh at the highest rate.  But, last October we only used 482 kWh, so we probably weren't going to use the 558 kWh that we'd have to in order to reach the bad reading.  If next month's reading was 35,656, the energy company would probably decide that the meter had rolled and charge us for 99,923 kWh.  Plus, I don't like having inaccurate data.  So, I called in the correct reading and they were nice enough to fix it.

Our bill went down $50 and I can have some anecdotal evidence that leaving Amanda in the dark could in fact be reducing our electricity usage.

J in Joy School