As someone who does not have kids, and who mostly enjoys solitude in her cozy little house with only her dog for company, having three children for an entire day can be quite a bit of madness to handle. That’s exactly what happened to me this weekend. A few weeks back I’d offered to babysit my godkids overnight as a gift to their parents so they could spend a romantic evening at a nice hotel for their anniversary. They have three children, Kailee (10), Kaden (8), and Katya (3). The older two are pretty easy to watch-the only thing you have to worry about is bickering, as siblings do, but the toddler can be another story. She’s going through her “why?” phase, where she asks you “why?” or “what?” in response to every single thing you say until you just about go mad. But, just about when you’re starting to feel like snapping, she says “Angie. Angie. Angie.” and her response to “Yes, Kat Kat?” is “I love you.” Wham-you’re not mad anymore. It’s too cute.
The three were dropped off to me about 5:30pm on Saturday evening, and after their parents took off I loaded them all up into my tiny car and we headed to the market to get some groceries and something fun to do. We decided on Pizza for dinner, Sherbet for dessert, popcorn and candy for movie time, and coloring books. Kailee wanted an adult coloring book since they were more intricate, Kaden a sketch pad so he could instead make up his own designs with a new set of crayons, and Katya really didn’t care-so she ended up with a Frozen coloring book that was mostly discarded for the evening.
By Sunday morning the rain had stopped and it was a total Winter Wonderland outside. I decided we were done coloring and watching TV and that we should go out in the snow for a while. I wanted to wear the kids out and I needed to shovel the walks, so it worked out. Plus, it allowed me to break out my camera and get some good shots of them playing with Bub in the snow. Bub LOVED having the kiddos there. The night before he’d knocked Kaden down and planted himself on top, pinning Kaden so that he was helpless against the onslaught of pibble kisses. Then, in the snow that morning, he chased them all around the yard and ran from them playfully as they threw snowballs in his direction. For a while he tried to catch the snowballs and eat them, and then he finally started hiding behind me for cover. It was the cutest thing.
I wanted to share some of the cute photos I took yesterday with you, so here they are.
Of course, after about twenty minutes the two younger ones were too cold and demanded to go inside. So I took the two in, along with Bub, and put them in front of the TV while Kailee and I headed out front so I could shovel the front sidewalk. Kailee decided to build a snowman and set to rolling large leaf-covered balls of snow towards each other. After another half hour or so the baby decided she wanted to come out again and she happily played in the snow while her sister and I worked on the snowman. Unfortunately I had my aperture off really bad with the final snowman photos, and I didn’t check them while I was taking them (let that be a lesson to us all!), so there were only a few that were salvageable with editing.
We didn’t have any stones, so I suggested we use berries for the face, other than the carrot nose, and Kailee stuck leafs and twigs into the snowman’s (or snowwoman’s) head to make hair. Tell me, isn’t this kind of a crazy looking snowman? I made a joke about naming it Buffalo Bill… Luckily, the ten year old is just old enough to kind of understand jokes like that, but not know the full implication haha! Though, the more I look at it the more cute it seems… So the initial terror is wearing off a little. lol
Having the kids there was so much fun. Bub got to play with them and it wore all three of them out, we got snuggles as we watched movies, and I got to play house for a little bit with them. As fun as it was, it was also nice when they went home with mom and dad and Bub and I got to snuggle up and take a nap, as we were both exhausted from all of the activity and kid-chasing.
