Thursday, August 9, 2007

Picnic in the Basement

On the hottest day of the year so far, I decide to take care of some furniture business for Clif's office. He was home working in his office and the triplets were nestled in their 85 degree room taking a nap. Austin and I headed to Costco for some office supplies and a filing cabinet.

The bank I passed on the way home must have fried a wire or two in the heat because the sign that reports the current temperature read 112 degrees Fahrenheit! It certainly wasn't that hot, although it felt pretty close when you add in the humidity.

In this blazing heat I had decided that I would be able to load a 130lb. lateral file into my conversion van. I blame that poor decision on the heat and the 30 minute wait to get someone to get it off of the shelf for me. I figured it would be like pulling teeth to get someone to follow me out and load it in this hot weather. And I was in a bit of a rush.

Luckily a nice, somewhat elderly man helped me out. It was his "lucky" day. He had parked next to a crazy lady trying to get home before her triplet toddlers woke up. We had to take it out of the box to get it into my van. He was so nice. I'm sure he and his wife had a nice little laugh on the way home, though.

Poor Austin was sitting in this hot car strapped in his car seat during the 10 minutes we wrestled with this cabinet. He was a trooper. His reward was a nice cold chocolate shake on the way home. My reward was the shake cup being empty when he fell asleep with the shake in hand.

When I arrived home I summoned Clif to help get this newly acquired anchor weight of a filing cabinet out and down to his office. It didn't seem nearly as heavy with him on the other end.

After all of this wrestling in the 100 degree heat, I was not about to turn on any appliance that would make more heat. So I sent Clif to get salads and chicken wings and we took the food to the basement for a picnic. This produced two big bonuses. First, the temperature was several degrees cooler. The best thing of all was no kitchen clean-up. I spread a neat-sheet (if you don't have one, you must buy one) on the basement floor and we had a picnic; minus the flies and ants. Unfortunately, the only camera I had was my cell phone. Had I run upstairs to get my digital...well, let's just say it would have been a big mess.

Do you know how nice it is in my house to not have to clean up the kitchen right now? If you are a multiple mom reading this you are screaming "YES...YES...YES!!!!". Three toddlers quickly approaching two can make a mess out of anything in 3 minutes or less. They think it's fun right now to drop/throw food. This is a phase that I'd love to fast forward through.



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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

we use to have indoor picnincs lots when my older 2 were little and we lived in Auckland especially when my sister and her children use to come visit
we used a sheet or two

Anonymous said...

Great idea. I think I would do that more often and avoid so much clean-up because I am sure it was great fun for the children.