Red Crayon and Window Wells...

Life with children (let me say boys) is not boring, that's for sure!  The past couple of days have added new depth to my patience training.  Sunday afternoon we instructed the boys to play quietly in their room.  They were playing very quietly and I was impressed (note to self when children are quiet there is a 99.5% chance that they are up to no good, after having Ethan for the past six years I know this to be true, but every once in a while they'll surprise you by reading a book or playing quietly).  All of a sudden we hear Ryan running from the kitchen to the bedroom.  That is indeed odd seeing that he was in his bedroom and we never heard him come out.  Is this magic, unfortunately it was not.  The boys (granted they did work together) popped out the screen window in their bedroom and then Ethan lowered Ryan out of the window.  There is a window well right under the boys window, but as luck would have it Ethan lowered Ryan onto the eight inches that were not the window well.  They were of course very sorry and informed us that they were just trying to sneak out so they could collect rocks. Ummmm need I mention they are only 6 and 4!!! What am I going to do when they're 16?

Now on to red crayon.  I was doing laundry the other day (I was finally on my last load) and as I took my whites out of the dryer I noticed that there were red spots all over.  My first thought, was "What the... how did blood get all over my clean whites?"  Upon further investigation I found a melted red crayon all over my skivvies, tank tops, undershirts, the boys dress shirts, and socks.  I was not amused. I asked both the boys if they had put crayon in the dryer.  They both insisted that they didn't. When I told Ethan what had happened, he looked at me and said, "Ohh, that's tooo bad."  It's funny how little things like that can affect you so much. I felt so violated.  How could this have happened to me???  I quickly googled, "how to get melted crayon out of clothes"  and found hundreds of pleas from people just like me who had this terrible experience :) Just in case this should ever happen to you here's the solution.  Rewash the clothes on the hottest water setting and mix 1 cup detergent with 1 cup shout stain remover. I did this twice and most of the clothes were able to be saved. The rest turned orange.  Most of the cottons came out nice and white although a few had faint spots.  I was fairly impressed.  I'm glad to have Magic Eraser(it cleaned out the dryer in a jiffy) and google search(it made me feel better to know there were many others who've had this experience :)