Distracted by bat houses

The last few days have been all over the map when it comes to behaviour around here and needless to say  I have been very frustrated. I will not even get into all the things that they have been up to because I would rather show what we did instead.

Hang on, I have to see what Fudge is talking, he says a grasshopper is giving birth....

Indeed there is a grasshopper laying eggs in our yard, it was very cool, I took pictures but they are on the other camera and I have to find the cord for that one.

Okay back to my need to distract my kids from their behaviours for awhile. They asked me yesterday if they could make a bat house, I said not right now. Then this morning as Calvin was refusing to eat his breakfast because he was mad at his Dad ( it was so not about the oatmeal) I decided to use the bat house as a motivator after we had finished talking about all the huge feelings he was having so that he would actually eat the said oatmeal and we could move on,


We went to the store and got the supplies, came home and went to work. You can build one, it is easy peasy.

here is all the stuff you need, some 1/4" plywood, some scrap wood, glue, nails, caulking and a piece of plastic mesh. The plastic mesh can be hard to find, we took ours from the back of a roofing vent.

Trace around your mesh screen to make a front and a back. The front needs to be 1 inch shorter than the back.

I made them both the same size to start and then cut an inch off one of them after.

 Then I measured out the 2  long sides on the scraps of wood, you do not want them to be more than about 1/2 inch thick but their width does not matter.  I started the boys off with the cut and then let them use the hand saw.

Then I laid out wood on 3 sides ( some cutting mistakes were made by small people) and then we glued them down on top of the mesh so that mesh would held in place by more than just nails.

Then we put the top on so it looked like this

 Then I started the nails and the boys hammered them in. please ignore Calvin's forehead, it appears he has impetigo and he got from the lake, yes it is gross, it looks way better now than it did earlier this week. I just noticed that both of the pictures are of Calvin working, Fudge did some too, honest.

The next step is to caulk all the seams as you want it to be air tight and waterproof, bats like heat. Then we cut a piece to go across the top to make it more durable and nailed it on. Once the caulking is dry we will paint the whole thing black and hang it in a tree. They say that the bats will climb through the opening and use the mesh to hang from.

While the caulking is drying I came inside to finish dealing with the garden bounty from today, tomatoes, beans, broccoli and kale all destined for the freezer or canning pot.

Now I am going finish writing on my children's clothing and then we are going out for Pho. I will tell you more about the oatmeal, the Chinese water torture and the writing on t-shirts tomorrow along with pictures of that grasshopper because it was pretty cool.


PS Christine or Corey taught me to write on my kids clothing because they are awesome and creative like that, I just can't remember who did it first so they will share the credit unless one of them fills me in.

PPS I can not explain the formatting in this post, stupid add captions options had a mind of it's own today.