Promoting Family Togetherness and Creativity



1. Arrange for your water heater to fail (this was definitely not what we planned, but it happened anyway).

2. Spend Friday night wet-vaccing, ripping up carpet and pad, draining the heater, and so on, while your kids go nuts upstairs because nobody's putting them to bed. This is even better if you have a fabulous dad who's willing to stay until midnight, rip his hand open on a carpet tack, and provide lots of help! (Thanks again, Dad!)

3. Order the water heater and installation over the phone the next morning and feel good because, in just a few hours, you'll have hot water again. And you can use your gift card to boot!

4. A few hours later, call back to see why your water heater and plumber have not arrived. Re-order the heater and installation because it got sent to the wrong store.

5. Wait a couple more hours to find that, instead of being put on the plumber's truck, the heater
has been sent to Salt Lake. It is too late for anyone to install it without charging an emergency fee. Grumble and murmur about how this company did not benefit from its merger with a certain well-known discount chain.

6. Drive out to Salt Lake to purchase the heater and bring it home. Discover upon arrival that the wrong heater has been ordered for you. The bright spots from this trip are that you get to go ahead and use that gift card, and that, blessedly, they have the heater you really ordered in stock. The nice people at the store even offer to cancel the erroneous order and set up installation for Monday. Bring home the heater and stick it in the carport.

7. Round up your filthy, grumpy, hungry family and drive around trying to decide where to eat. Finally settle on Chuck-A-Rama (a place you swore you'd never go) because it has something everyone might like.

8. Sit down at a family-style table in blessed coolness and feel the grumpies melt away as you enjoy talking and laughing with your kids as they all get to eat their favorite foods. Watch your husband get a childlike gleam in his eye as he visits the dessert buffet, and enjoy listening to his memories of going out to buffets with the Young Men growing up. Share your own embarrassing ice-cream machine moment at Golden Corral and watch everyone smile.

9. Drive to Grandma and Grandpa's house to get everyone clean. In a flurry of bubbles, wet hair, and towels, you catch a glimpse of your parents combing through hair and reliving the days when they got their own children ready for Sunday. Life is good.

10.Drive to the store to choose frozen meals for Sunday so that you don't have to boil endless pots of water to do all the dishes (thank you, honey)!

11. Enjoy a true day of rest.

12. Monday morning, have your husband work from home so that he is around when the plumber comes just in case he comes while you're taking children to ballet. (Make sure your plumber is as nice and funny as the one that showed up at our house. He let Christopher watch him and got Tiffer to eat all his breakfast--not a small feat, I can assure you--by telling Tiffer he'd leave the water heater box for him if he finished it!) Enjoy having Daddy home for a change, and have a ball watching thd kids race through their chores so they can play in the big box the plumber left behind. Smile as you watch them lose themselves in pure childhood. And don't forget to take pictures!

In case you can't tell, the kids decided to turn their box
into a house with a blanket for a door--there's "furniture"
inside, too!