Fiction Guest Post By #5.

I have a special treat today. #5 has agreed to do a guest post.

Me: I have a favor to ask you.

#5: What?

Me: Will you do a guest post on my blog?

#5: Mmm. Maybe. How much work do I have to do?

Me: Nothing. You did it already {I held up the story he had written}. You just have to say yes.

#5: Okay. Can I play on your iPad?

It’s a good story. Thrills, suspense, danger, bacon. Lots of monsters. We’re both quite proud of it.

On this day of giving thanks and counting blessings I always try to take a moment to remember maniacal and implicitly undead yet tasty breakfast meats . Enjoy!

One dark, dreary Halloween night, me Ethan, Hank, Brandon, Paton, and Chucky walked into a creepy haunted house in a cemetary with our candy. Giant black spiders were crawling everywhere. That completely explained why there was absolutely no girls there. A giant, greasy, delicious looking piece of bacon walked up and invited us in. We walked in terrified as a sharp, deadly blade shot out of the wall. I saved us all except for the bacon, because then I knew it was a trap. Grease was splurting out of the bacon.

As a prize for saving us from them, they let me eat it. I devoured the bacon. Everyone was amazed by how fast I ate it. It was terrific bacon, and the best bacon I have ever tasted. I started to wonder who made all of the bacon. We tried to run for our lives, but the huge, scary door slammed closed with a quick squeak before we had a chance to get out. We all screamed louder than we have ever screamed before.

We tried as hard as we could to open the huge, scary door. We were trapped!

We friendly tip-toed up the creepy, broken stairs. The stairs broke even more and squeaked every time we took a step. When we finally got to the top of the stairs, we tumbled straight into a trap door. We tried to jump out but it was way too high. Another problem of getting out, is there were scary bats everywhere. Then, big army ants came out and tried to kill us! The army ants ate my pants, but luckily Chucky had an extra pair incase I wet myself, which also happened. We ran trembling. We stopped at the corner. They almost killed us when a big, blood sucking vampire swooped by and flew us back out. He told us “The evil bacon is finally fighting back, and they going to eat all of you and me. After that, they are going to take over the world. They are go also going to eat me too because they called me a trader!” I asked, “who makes the bacon?” He said, “An evil devil!” The bacon heard us talk and came out and chased us. We all screamed, and ran for dear life.

We bounced trough the scary house screaming the whole entire time. A big, spooky ghost came out of the wall, but we rushed right through his stomach and he disapeared. A big, bloody zombie jumped out of a coffin. I got a hold of Eathan and was about to eat him when I noticed an ax was on the wall, and I chopped the zombie’s bloody arm off. The zombie was completely bleeding. We sadly all lost all of our candy in the spooky, deadly haunted house.

We almost got out, when we relized the evil, wanting victorious, deadly bacon was going to still take over the world and get their victory. So, we ripped out the sords and knives that we forgot about and used them agenst the bacon. We had the fight of our lives while stabbing, cutting, chopping and devouring all the bacon. The evil bacon sadly ate Paton and he was digested and never heared from again but the rest of us happily destroyed the evil and got out safe. We all had a party/funeral without a body. We all cheered for saving the world, but we were sad Paton got eaten. Luckly we were happy enough to wash the sadness away though.

The End.

backcover — Back cover: "Run for your cold, dead lives!"

Ummm. . .

Sometimes the kids will say things that deeply resonate with me:

#5: I really want to climb the walls. Can I climb the walls?

I totally get that. Often, I want to climb the walls. So I let him. I should clarify that by “walls” he means “doorframe”, which has handy grabby bits around the edges, plus leverage, especially when you’re very bendy and lightweight and about four feet tall. When he comes to me and says this I let him “climb the walls” three times. He usually does two right away and then saves one for later, unless one of his sisters grabs him and pulls him down in the middle of a climb because they want to get into the refrigerator or else just torment him because really, if they wanted to get into the refrigerator they could just go through the other doorway.

If you’re ever at my house and you notice dirty footprints on the top of the doorway into the kitchen, this is why.

Sometimes the kids will say things and it makes me wonder what goes on in their heads:

#5: (explaining his graphing math homework to me, which involved solving a problem and then plotting the answer number and its opposite on a line) I don’t like to think of them as opposites. I prefer to refer to them as evil twins.

Oh yeah, positive, negative. Evil twins would totally make math more interesting. I wish I’d thought of it.

Then sometimes they say things that make me glad I don’t know what goes on in their heads. Or in their private time, behind closed doors.

#5: Do you think dogs’ hands taste better than their feet, like ours do?

Ummm. . .

Happy Halloween

I may as well get it out there, because you guys are going to find out sooner or later.

The winter storm that hammered the east coast this weekend was all our fault. Perhaps the fault of my family as a whole, or it may be that the blame can be placed squarely on my shoulders.

#1 believes, and the idea is not without merit, that this was God’s way of telling us that we should have taken our Christmas lights down.

She bases this belief on the fact that the giant branch that landed five feet from her head and could have killed her instead took out the gutters, to which the lights were attached.

If you look at the vertical bar in the center of the picture, that’s the gutter. With the Christmas lights. As far as why those lights are still up, that’s another post entirely.

But it may have been me and what I wrote about Winter on Facebook.

crosses — Halloween decorations at the start of the snow

non-crosses — Halloween decorations, plus branches.

I’ll not be taunting Winter in print in the future.

I feel like we’re the luckiest people on the planet. It’s hard to show in the pictures, but we had two giant branches that just missed doing serious damage to the house, not to mention the one that didn’t land on #1.

Besides the gutters, we got our porch pierced:

And that’s it so far. That’s it!

So. Lucky.

The power’s still out. School is cancelled. I just hipped the little ones to the fact that power out days count as snow days. If we go over three snows days, they have to make it up at the end of the school year. Two down so far, and winter hasn’t even begun.

CC got a generator today, thanks to the shop that our shows rent their sound gear from. We now have heat. We got power to the freezer and the fridge before we lost anything. We have the internet back.

I Facebook-bitched about how the county hadn’t even started to clear our street yet- it’s completely blocked by one of the giant branches that didn’t land on my house- and they showed up within fifteen minutes. Never doubt the power of social media.

No school parties, no Halloween parade, and the neighborhood with the best candy and haunted houses behind us is pitch black and deadly with debris and laden branches that continue to fall. But #1 came home from an errand and said that everyone was out on main street, trick-or-treating where all the businesses have power. They went to main street and hit all the houses between here and there while it was still daylight. As soon as they finish hand washing the dinner dishes by candlelight, we’ll eat candy and make s’mores and continue telling spooky stories that may or may not involve the county’s wood chipper (whirring away in front of the house) and wayward children.

Here’s to Halloween miracles.