Building Birdhouses

The boys started back to school today, and I must admit that a quiet house was kind of nice...for awhile. However, I sort of started missing them and the noise they create in our house.

I knew they would be kind of tired when they got home after a long school day, but I wanted the whole family to spend some time together since it was Brian's day off. After we picked the boys up from school and made a quick trip to Wal-Mart, Brian and I sat down with the boys to put together some birdhouse kits that the boys got for Christmas from Grandma Barbara.

Our family project began with the boys trying to tear open the boxes while I tried to convince them that we needed to do it carefully so that the pieces would not break or get lost. Let's just say that we met somewhere in the middle. Once the boxes were open, we started looking at and following the directions. It took Brian and me about 2 minutes to determine the instructions were worthless, and we branched out on our own.

We glued. We nailed. I was helping Nathan, and at one point in the building phase, he said, "This is man's work!" Unfortunately, when you see the picture, you might agree.

It was all going great until it came time to put the roof on the birdhouse. Somehow, the sides of Nathan's birdhouse were a little too high for the roof to lay flat. (Hmmmm...I wonder how that happened?) Needless to say, Nathan and I had to use a seriously huge amount of glue to get the roof on his birdhouse.

Now, I try to be a cool "boy" mom by doing "boy things" with them, but this event did not do much to build my credibility. In addition to Nathan's "man work" comment, David kept telling me that I was not real good at hammering or building. My sweet husband did stand up for me though by saying, "She might not be a builder but she does know how to fix a car."

I guess from now on we will skip the family building projects and will spend our family time giving the car a tune-up.
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I will have to add the pictures later. The camera battery is dead, and I can't take a picture. Once it is recharged, I will add a picture of the architecturally challenged birdhouse.