Great news! Hope the swallows get down to nesting in the other box now! I don't have all my bluebird boxes facing the same direction either, I have two that face north, two that face east and three that face northeast, however the height of all of them are pretty much the same. Five of them face open land/yard and two of them have open land on one side of them and the yard on the other. It really is amazing how much you can learn here though even when you have been doing it for awhile, this will only be my third year hosting bluebird, if they nest that is. LOL! Donna

I tried all of the above earlier and nothing worked. Then I saw loves2cook4six's instructions in her new thread, tried it word for word, and no more annoying green monsters!! Seriously, try it. It works. Here is a link that might be useful: Ugly Green Hyperlinks - GONE!

I thought of the knex too... but it did not keep the attention the way I thought it would. I think I thought it was cooler than they did. The legos have the same thing.. small amounts of attention grabbing BIG mess. As far as the mp3 player ... I have found periodically mp3 players for as little as 15 - 20 bucks which makes it much less steep. I would try and find one like that and go with the earning it with chores. But, I would make it extra chores.. things outside of what he normally should be doing. Like if he doesnt take out the trash or sweep the floor or clean the bathroom...even cleaning the car. To me, chores are part of being apart of the family so everyone does their share...it's when you do the extra stuff that earns you things. and there are always the crafty things like making wax leaves, decorating pine cones, finger painting is a good outdoor activity (at least for me since I don't like the mess on the hard wood floor), we also have done random things like go to the store and bought material to make costumes for like star wars... the girls were leia and then we had luke and obi wan. and there is always a holiday to make things for like valentines day coming up and easter... there are websites for teachers and people like that that have a million ideas.. just search creative kids and creative holiday crafts and there are about a million different websites. as far as drawing stencils and stickers are a good starting point for them... make a place for barbie sticker to stick ie big castle is drawn with fairies to bring her cupcakes and so on. or dinosaur is sleeping in its nest with eggs blah blah blah it works fairly well.

@strategery, @Mark Bischak, @chispa, thanks for the single door suggestion! We did consider that, but we like that we can open both doors to move large items through and love the look of the double door. @strategery, both the active and inactive doors are each 3 feet wide, which feels plenty big for us. :)