Just me...just sayin': 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: