KId Weekend #4,872

When I handed my brother his September birthday gift card proclaiming "Free babysitting for one weekend", I thought he would take it in the spirit it was given, as a joke.

He did not.

And so, last Friday evening, he and his wife slowed their car down outside my house, pushed the kids out, and screeched off in a cloud of dust. I swear I heard something like "free at last, free at last..!"coming from their car as it roared down the street.

So, as the kids arrived, so did the rain. Trapped inside with three kids, I met my weekend fate with a brave smile. Things I had planned for them included:

* Painting Crafts

* Charlie Chaplin Film Festival

* More Painting Crafts

* "Fossil Cookies" bakeoff

* More Building kit craft thingies

* Looney Tunes Festival

* Legos, Legos, Legos

* a really fun game called "Let's help Auntie clean up!"

Upon entering my humble domicile, they unloaded their supplies and dug into the first craft activity:

a mere ten minutes later:

Thankfully it was a bit too late to start another craft project, so I settled them into their swell weekend beds and I began the Chaplin Film Festival:

These kids thoroughly enjoyed "Modern Times" - specifically the Feeding Machine sequence. I thought I'd be changing wet sleeping bags, they were laughing so hard! At one point, the 10 year old said.."This guy was a genius!":

Following the "must not sleep - must avoid sleep - must stay up longer than anyone" secret contest the three were holding - they finally sacked out around midnight! The next morning, they were treated to Auntie's homemade cinnamon rolls. Yes, I said homemade! Well, they were made in a home, anyway:

Then, due to the storm outside, the craft storm inside continued:
Craft casualty:

and after a LOOOOOOOONG day, HOMEMADE pizza for all (except the youngest, who preferred his spongebob mac and cheese):
Most everyone enjoyed their dinner:
Following this, I decided to torture myself....excuse me, I mean challenge myself to make cookies with them. Special Cookies. Martha Stewart Cookies.

First Mistake: Making cookies with three kids.

Second Mistake: Making cookies from a Martha Stewart magazine recipe.

Third Mistake: There was no third mistake! The cookies actually turned out great!

Yes, this was a "fossil cookies" Halloween recipe that called for:

- fancy ass refined sugar

- thrice milled flour

- sea salt

- organic eggs

- organic salt free butter

- African vanilla bean pods and plastic bugs.

I used:

- Pillsbury pre made cookie dough

- some sugar from my sugar bowl

- plastic bugs

They actually turned out pretty good! Following the massive cleanup effort (done alone, mind you), I dumped the kids into bed and the Chaplin Film Festival, part two, began:

They really enjoyed "The Kid" and kept asking if the kid was still alive. Alas, they were too young to even revel in the knowledge that the kid turned into Uncle Fester. Since it was only, god forbid, 10pm, they wanted more.

So we watched "The Gold Rush" an old favorite of theirs. The house falling off the cliff sequence is a favorite, and again, the 10 year old noted how they didn't have computers back then, so it must have been really hard to make it look so real.

Sunday morning I was awakened by a small boy informing me tearfully that he had "ruined my rug". I tell ya, there is nothing that will wake you up faster than jumping out of bed at 7am to clean up barf on the oriental rug. Perhaps the fossil cookies, mixed with the pizza, mixed with the apples, mixed with the soda, mixed with the spongebob fruit snacks had something to do with it?

Needless to say, no one was really hungry for breakfast. Once the smell was somewhat cleared out of my very small 700 square foot home, we watched Looney Tunes for a few hours. A clear favorite was "Bunny Hugged" an early Bugs Bunny offering that introduced "Crusher":

They could not get enough of this cartoon! Good thing it's a classic and well worth repeated viewings.

Around lunchtime I began praying for early release and decided to pull out the thousands of legos for them to argue over. Thank god for legos! As the rain poured buckets outside, we emptied buckets of legos inside. The 7 year old built this awesome pyramid, and even DP was impressed:

meanwhile the girl was busy designing an equestrian center!
Now, a visit to auntie's is NOT complete until I have pulled out the camera and tortured them for awhile. The first photo up is the clear winner:
But despite the poor lighting I was dealing with, I got some great shots of the kids!







All in all, a great, LONG, wonderful weekend filled with crafts, food, kids, and a little barf.

Remember, what happens at Auntie's...STAYS at Aunties:

The Youngest shows herself party worthy

You didn't think all the kid parties were done for the year, did you? SUCKER!! We merely took a month break between Mr August and Ms September here!

The youngest niece, often lost in the shuffle of tween chatter and preschool whining, has now reached the big bad ass age of ONE! Now that she is officially on her feet, the following life changes will occur:

* Her chance of being stomped on by marauding kids flying through the playroom will lessen dramatically.

* Her reach will extend from "carpet fuzz in front of me" to "windowsill where mommy keeps her Starbucks".

* Shoes will take on much higher importance as feet pound from carpet to grass to cement in no time.

* Her crib bars will become great levelers for her climbing stunts.

To celebrate such milestones, the family gathered to shower her with gifts, cake and photo ops:

Here is the cake I convinced my sister to get:
(it tasted as good as it looked...although the whole eating of fondant is beyond me. Kids seemed to like it though). Some people, I WON'T SAY WHO, seemed a little pissed off at the attention shift:

While guests and cousins and family and dogs hung around the following present and cake display, I snuck the guest of honor out front for a few first birthday photographs:
The following represent the best shots I got, gotten despite the constant interruption of kids running through, dogs running through, a rambling toddler standing behind, on and on top of me, and several outbursts from the mother at the kids and dogs running through the shots:


Occasionally, the older sister would make her presence known:
then it was back to the star:



Here she is showing off her new found standing and walking skill:
Finally, after some 50 plus shots, it was time for the star attraction to pay homage to the pile of gifts awaiting her destruction:
Someone, I WON'T SAY WHO, discovered a Dora the Explorer wrapped gift and naturally assumed it was for her:


The star attraction was completely entranced by the box hidden under the Dora wrapping paper - never mind the cool kitchen play set inside of it:
Eventually she got around to opening more of her gifts:
Meanwhile the "old kids" were dying of boredom and entertaining themselves in many different ways:

Little Miss One would occasionally wander back to her favorite gift, "empty box", and have to be pulled back into the gift pile to resume her unwrapping duties:

there she goes again:
After a brief rest period with daddy, the star attraction was ready to check out the cake:

Bravely she tore it apart (a little bit) and tried it:
a little unsure of it:
She never really destroyed it, as many of the others had - perhaps she had already been to too many kid parties in her year of life? Here is a final image, my favorite shot of the day:
and a quick video montage of the party:

3 more kid parties to go!