A day in the life....

I'm kind of cheating on this one because I wrote it yesterday and posted it to the Yahoo group we have for our class. But I'm going to copy and paste it here for my first post :)


For those of you that think there is too much going on and can't study let me just tell you about a day in the life of the Allen household...

I was peacefully going about studying accounting and printing off exercises when the doorbell rang. I open the door to see a woman I've never seen before and one of my 14 year old daughter's friends. The woman proceeds to tell me about how this girl apparently belongs here (at this point I have no idea what she is talking about) and how she had stayed out until 3am with her son. But the girl (Tricia is her name) won't tell the woman where she lives so she is bringing her back to our house since Tricia was supposed to be spending the night (a story Tricia had completely made up to avoid getting in trouble I assume). Too much drama for me so I pass this one off to my wife and daughter.

So now back to studying. Then maybe 30 minutes later I hear Tina (my wife) yelling at one of my son's friends because he had decided that since we are remodeling the downstairs bathroom and there is no toilet in there that he would just go outside and pee in the backyard. Now I know some of you are thinking, "and....?" but it's a generally accepted rule that once you are past the age of 2 and not drunk that it is not okay to pee in the yard. But whatever, Tina seems to have this one handled too. So this time I decide to go outside on the porch and sit in the rocking chair and read my accounting book since it is quieter out there.

I manage to finish chapter 3 (okay, so I'm a little behind....) when I hear arguing coming from the living room. I go inside to find out what is going on and find my 16 year old son (also named Karl) is arguing with Tina about why he can or can't pee outside. After all, he shouldn't have to go all the way upstairs, and if the dog can pee outside why can't he? Not one to get into arguments about things like this I simply told everyone in the room (which consisted of 6 teenagers) that peeing outside was unacceptable. They would use one of the upstairs bathrooms...end of conversation.

But when you are 16 everyone is against you and somehow the conversation conveyed that message to Karl. He got mad and said he was leaving. He starts looking for the keys to the van so he could leave while I stand there and tell him that he is not going anywhere. He is not listening and finds the keys so by this time I have to get
in his face. Not something I like to do (as a red usual and blue needs) but he left me with no choice. So we are standing there in the hallway face to face as I stare him down and essentially dare him to try and get past me. He finally throws the keys down, hits the refrigerator door, kicks some boxes and storms outside managing to
shatter the glass in the storm door in the process. So now I have a house in chaos, broken glass all over the foyer and porch, and my son walking off down the street.

Then maybe an hour later, still trying to deal with the previous situation, Tina and my youngest daughter are moving a china hutch but Morgan doesn't realize the top and bottom of the hutch are not attached. So she is pushing on the hutch and manages to push it off the base so all the vases and various pieces of china that I picked up
in Korea slide off and land on the floor in a whole bunch of tiny little pieces. Oh, and somehow a little while later Morgan managed to break off one of our kitchen cabinet doors.

And all that happened before 2:00pm. Now back to accounting....