Boy Oh Boy!

A couple weeks ago we babysat for the Kearls and the Hedgecocks because we owed them both for watching our kids more than once. It seems like it is harder and harder for Michael and I to ask anyone to babysit for us anymore, because we have a couple of good friends who we know we can always count on to watch our boys for us if we need them too, but we don’t want to take advantage of their kindness and ask them too frequently. And then most other people we have asked to babysit for us have never asked us back to watch their kids for them, so we don’t feel like we can ask them again. We just have more kids than many of our friends do, so it’s hard to ask people to take on so many little boys all at once. And I guess people don’t ask us to babysit for them because they think it would be too many kids for us, but these photos will lay those fears to rest. So, to all of our friends who read this, please, ask us to babysit – we are always looking for opportunities to trade babysitting with friends.

Anyways, coming back from that little tangent – we watched the Hedgecocks’ and Kearls’ kids, and the Wellses happened to come over that night and brought ice cream, so we ended up having ice cream with all the kids. With our boys and Marie Wells, there were 9 kids total, but it made it a lot more fun to babysit with friends over while we did it.

And the video at the end is from a different night, but it shows a typical game night at our place before we round up all the wild children and put them to bed so that the parents can enjoy some games. The boys (and Katie) will often run back and forth from the bedroom to the living room, and lately they have started yelling things while they run, like “Fire!” or “Tornado!” But a bunch of little kids age 4 and younger yelling “Tornado” sounds a lot like “Tomato,” so I had to grab the camera and catch that on tape. Pretty cute! But, of course, it didn’t take them long to realize they were being recorded, and then they all stopped running to pose and act silly for the camera. Isn’t that always the case – when I want to catch something on video, they stop whatever they are doing and pose for the camera, but if I wanted to take a cute picture of them, they would probably start running around the house.

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Eli's Third Birthday Party

Eli's third birthday was January 31st, but since we were traveling on his birthday, we did his party in February. He has been really into trains lately, and he especially loves Thomas and Percy (which were recently introduced to him and Kolby when they got some Thomas toy trains for Christmas from my mom). He wanted a Thomas the Train party, so I made an attempt at decorating a cake with Thomas on it (it didn't turn out professional-looking or anything, but the kids liked it a lot). The main event at the party was getting out the train set and letting all the kids play with it (I think that at this age most of the kids are too young to really get into organized party games, and they are too much work to organize, so playing with trains seems good enough to me). And then he opened presents. You can see in the pictures that the coveted gift by the kids at the party was the ice cream cone that launched the foam "ice cream" ball into the air at the push of a button, from Jordan and Carter Hedgecock -- each kid wanted a turn shooting the ball. Eli loved all of the nice gifts from his friends and had a lot of fun playing with everyone and eating cake and ice cream. I love doing these little birthday parties for the boys, especially while they are so young and it takes so little to please them.

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