But there's NOTHING to do there!!!!

These are the words I heard on MORE THAN ONE occasion from MORE THAN ONE mouth. OK, I get that our house is the "hang out" house. We splurged on a nice BIG TV a little while back. We have more Wii games than almost anyone I know, and low and behold..I cook during the day generally. So that means EVERY ONE of my children's cronies comes HERE to hang out!!! Well, today that was NOT cool! Not cool, at all!!!


Today ice came to Dallas. Yeah, yeah, everyone living up North is calling us a bunch of pussies. Well, we're warm weather people here, we DON'T know how to drive in this shit (but some of us THINK we can!!!) Schools across the metroplex shut down (ours called us at 5:30AM to let us know by recorded message that there would be no school today), people that could work from home worked from home, the local news had a reason to stay on through the ENTIRE FOUR hours of the Today Show! (Bastards! I wanted to see Matt, Al, Ann, and Meredith, not four cars stuck on an overpass for 2 hours!!!) Yeah, Texas pretty much shuts down when ice comes to town.
So my husband was one of those that opted to work from home. And I use the term work loosely here. Because on more than one occasion there were screaming matches between myself, the kids and him on who was allowed in the house and why. My son's BFF came over first thing this morning to "play". They usually get WAY too loud when they play. Josh cranks up the surround sound and no one in a 3 block radius can concentrate because of the sounds of Rock Band blaring from our home. Then my daughter gets going and wants to play Boogie on the Wii. To which my husband tells the boys to play with her and QUIETLY!! This is after I've already lectured both sets of children about LEAVING DADDY ALONE, HE'S WORKING.
So after all this, and arguing that I refuse to FEED the masses when we're TRYING to watch our expenses around here, I tell the boys to go over to BFF's house. "Nut there's nothing to do over there!!" I heard this from BOTH boys!! WTF?!?! So I countered with..."OK, so let me get this straight, BFF has a Wii and an xBox...WE have a Wii and xBox...BFF has a big screen TV, as do we. And yet there's PLENTY to do around here, but NOTHING to do over there?!?! Ummm..No! not buyin' it!!" They'd already tried to tell me that BFF's parents had to go to work today, then it was BFF's parents are still in bed. So I argued that by noon they are OUT of bed! GO OVER THERE!! When they tried to get away with saying that BFF only has one guitar for Guitar Hero I told them to take our oldest one and GO!! So the boys leave, all is well again. Hubby can concentrate and I can Wii Fit FINALLY.
Then the girl lets TWO of her friends in, and the chaos begins again!! "Why can't you go to their houses?" And their response? You guessed it..."But there's NOTHING to do there!!!" OMG!!! I'm about to start spitting pea soup!! So I finally ended the tirade of BOTH children (the boys had spent ALL MORNING over here and came back after AN HOUR over at BFF's). I told everyone to go home and made my spawn clean the house. This was met with the usual groans, but they knew not to fight me or I'd open the door to the dungeon (aka office) and let out the fire-breathing dragon (aka Hubby) to rain down on them HIS wrath!!
So when the dragon emerged, laundry was cycling, the kitchen was clean, dog poop was picked up, and order seemed to be restored. So tonight I decided to end the day with a little Rock Band. The Hubby and I first played (me on drums, he on guitar) then it was Hubby (lead guitar), Me (vocals), and the girl (bass guitar). Right now Hubby and the kids are the game room watching a Ken Burns documentary entitled The War and I snuck off to check email and write a quick post. I'll leave you with a picture of me singing. The boy took the picture.