House Duels

The dust has almost settled and the basement is gutted. The long and short of it is - we fought the basement and the basement won. Kind of.

Sure we tore all his sheetrock off his studs. Sure we cleaned out all the junk and filled a decent sized dumpster with building materials and broken things. Sure we now have a nice open space down there, with potential oozing out the corners. (mixed in with the moisture at times...)

But within 24 hours of disturbing the beast we call Basement, he bit back.

The boys immediately recognized a great new scootering spot and spent all afternoon on Sunday going 'round and 'round, faster and faster, in their new wide open space.

Then Baby Boy got his finger caught on something unfriendly to digits and nearly tore it off. The good news is, he will get to keep it and still retain his right to flip off people who offend him in the future.

The bad news is he lost quite a bit of skin and a little bit of 'meat' and actually passed out, then threw up, as I changed his bandage this morning. He's doing fine now, all fixed up with a Q-tip split and about a pound of medical tape.

And since we didn't seem to get the message from Basement, the other two boys continued to mock his new nakedness and enjoy his flat scooter course.

Then Oldest Son's head became way too familiar with a post of some kind. The first hint I had of the injury was his friend coming into the kitchen inquiring about 'ice in a bag'....

I just had to ask, "for what?"

So now my oldest son and my youngest son have been duly warned by Basement and we are finally paying attention.

We have decided to let him rest in peace for a few days, then go down and see if he's forgiven yet.

I hate to break it to him, but we're in charge here. And some day he's going to make a lovely, lovely kid's play room. Whether he likes it or not.