Bonfire Wars

We've embarked on a project this week that we lovingly dubbed, "Burning the Crap."


Eloquent, I know.

You see, we have a woodburning stove and we heat our house with it all winter. Which means we spend all summer building up our stockpile of wood. The kids love helping to build the stockpile of wood. Ok, no they don't. But along with lots of good wood, we tend to collect the occasional bad hunk of wood in our firewood forays. These logs are known as "crap." So for the past several nights we've had big ol' bonfires to use up the "crap."

Rob was working on a pile of "crap" back yonder there. Wait, that didn't come out right. Wait, that didn't either! (Oh, you saucy little double entendres!)

Anyhow, Jonathan wasn't content to let Rob have all the fun. He decided to build a fire of his own.



Listen, I live in a house of boys. Anything can be turned into a competition: eating, running, racing from driveway to house, passing gas, and burping, (I win the burping competitions. Ahem.) just to name a few. And now, fire-building.

Look at the concentration on Rob's face. "Jonathan is soooo going down. My fire is bigger."

But Jonathan was on a mission. "I will not stop until my fire is bigger than Dad's."

He scouted the piles for the biggest pieces of crap he could find and lugged them over to his fire pit.

He did this over

And over againOnly resting occasionally to admire his handiwork and take a swig of his soda. Then it was back to work.I would've helped, but I was busy doing two things.

This

And this.

What finally tipped the scales in Jonathan's favor, however, was the addition of this door, which fell off the chicken coop the other day.

It was so hot, Jonathan could no longer get near enough to add more wood. Success!

And we have that much less crap sitting around. And if you ask me, the less crap, the better. Don't you think?