Squirrel Syndrome

 Have you seen the movie "Up"?  There's a scene where a talking dog is having a conversation with a little boy and mid-sentence he gets distracted and says, "squirrel!"  Dean has taken to referring to our distractions as "squirrel syndrome".  It's like the book, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie." If you give a mouse a cookie, he'll probably want a glass of milk...etc, etc. One thing leads to another and the mouse keeps getting more and more distracted.  Well, that was us today.  Our Black Friday plan was to put out Christmas decorations.  In order to put out Christmas decorations one must take down Thanksgiving decorations.  Which included the plethora of pumpkins on the porch.  (one pumpkin is never enough) So, there we were, pumpkins a plenty, and the boys begging for roasted pumpkin seeds.  Silly me, I took ONE pumpkin into the kitchen and started to hollow it out.  Dean, seeing what I was up to said, "If we're going to do this, let's at least make it fun."  Out came the machete's and everyone took a swing.  Definitely more fun dad's way.

    Then,  while cleaning the seeds for roasting, we started dreaming up ideas for our Christmas lights. I started lamenting the GINORMOUS palm bush thingy that was planted directly in front of our front door.  I seriously expected this thing to scream "Feed me Seymour" every time I walked by.  I HATED it and knew even Christmas lights couldn't make it look good.  The next thing I knew I heard more "thwacking".  Dean was putting the machetes to good use again.

Before

After

      It's not what we set out to do today, but our squirrel syndrome really paid off.  (Except for the moment I ran out to help lift the deceptively HEAVY stump into the wheelbarrow and forgot about the oil heating up on the stove.  Thank goodness for fire alarms and Ben running out the front door screaming "the house is on fire", as he headed, past us, to our designated 'safe zone' across the street.)
True Story, this actually led to us to opening all the windows to air out the house only to realize the screens were up in the crawl space, so, of course, we left the stump where it was and started putting all the screens on.

     In the end, Thanksgiving decorations were boxed up, the pumpkin seeds were tasty, we now have screens on the windows, the palm bush thingy was sent to the curb, and four Christmas totes made it out of the attic. Not bad, not bad at...."SQUIRREL!"