An Interesting Evening By The Fire

What? A fire already, you ask? :) No, it's not freezing outside yet, but this is what we HAVE to do before we set up our Christmas tree. Still confused?

It's to get rid of these suckers that like to make a home in our chimney every year! Yikes is right. Wasps!!!!! Gabe and I have lived in this house for six years now and we have this job planned out. It took a little while, but we have it. Flashlight- check, fly swatter- check, vacuum- check, matches- check, key for the gas- check, shoes on- check. Ok, we're ready. I'm sure it's hilarious to watch us and I can't believe I didn't think to blog about this last year. It's pretty funny. We get all of our supplies, make sure the kids are safe upstairs, and then we light the fireplace. It takes seconds for the wasps to start falling down. And there's literally 50-75 of them, if not more. And that's only the ones that come down, not the ones that are actually smart and fly up and away. Some burn up right away, some crawl to the back corners and slowly die, and some try to escape. That's when we come into play and have to vacuum them up or swat and kill them. Crazy, I know! Here's an up close picture of the ones in the vacuum.

We then take the canister outside to dump them and step on them to kill them. We have asked an exterminator about them before and he gave us some mumbo jumbo about covering the top of our chimney. Yeah, not sure if that would work. So if anybody has better advice, please let us know! :) Oh, the reason we have to do this before putting our tree up is because if any of the wasps escape past us, they might go into the tree and then we can't find them. This we learned about two years ago! Ha!

The kids were anxious to help Daddy get the tree out!

Zach was Daddy's little helper.

More pictures to come when everything is decorated!