From the "OH, Bull" files

My mom and dad have always been very generous people. I'm pretty sure their love language is gift giving. (Much to Steve's misfortune, I believe I have inherited this from them. The getting, more so than the giving. *blush*)

Well, along with grandparent gifts come the joy and frustration. For example, I found myself more than gracious when the cd player with not just ONE microphone but TWO attached microphones showed up at our house Christmas morning. (It was my mom's answer to my whining about having to listen to annoying children's CD's in the car.) I think she mistook earphones with microphones. There's no way on God's green earth that CD player will EVER find its way into my car!

Well, a month or two back Olivia became the proud owner of this 6x3 foot tent complete with Disney Princesses!
(I'm not sure what holiday was being celebrated, it could have just a casual mention by O that she would really really like an appallingly large pink Disney Princess tent to annoy her mother with and my mother just couldn't contain herself...or O's birthday, I just can't remember.)

Oh, how she nearly wet her pants as we set that thing up in my parents' living room. I wanted to hang that thing around my mom's neck as it took 4 adults over 1/2 hour to fold it back up and put it in it's "carrying" bag. (The only place I'm carrying this thing is to the curb on garbage day!)

After weeks upon weeks of bugging me to set this thing up (I've been using showing the house as a brilliant excuse for why we couldn't) I finally broke down today. Since it's been raining for a week straight and is practically cold enough to snow, it seemed only right to throw them a bone. O and Turner loved it. Baxter loved it too. For about 15 minutes they were in and out of that thing over 100 times. The problem- I had to set it back up 101 of those times.

I eventually blew my stack. Yelled at the kids, kicked the dog and wadded up the tent and threw it in the stairwell. The whole time we had the tent out O ran around the living room singing, "Bob, the builder YES YOU CAN!" When the tent finally got the best of me, Olivia looked at me and said, "Well, maybe daddy can set it up and get it to work!"

Dad, the builder-- yes YOU can!