We had a lovely weekend! As I am unaware of the normal scheduling of business life, I didn’t realize that Matt had the day off on Friday until he came home on Thursday night and announced his excitement at a 3 day weekend. I sputtered something about THAT must have been what he was talking about earlier in the week and now I understood and woo-hoo!!! He was going to be home on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday! I get very excited about Matt being home because not only do we get more time with him, but we can also try new activities that I am too scared to pull off on my own! Like going to the Puddle with two twoddlers on Friday morning!
On Saturday, we went to the Fourth of July carnival for kids at church, followed by the potluck. We planned to forgo the parade in lieu of much-needed naps, and it was canceled anyway due to rain. Zach and Rissa were decisively too young for carnival games, but this did not dampen their attempts at all! I laughed for a long time as Rissa beat everyone at Bozo Buckets by walking along the line of buckets and dropping balls into each pail from directly beside it. Both she and Zach stood right against the bean bag toss and plunked their bean bags directly into the holes, looking around as if wondering, “is this supposed to be hard or something?” They had no idea what to do for mini golf, but Will did and showed them how with gusto! Rissa kept running off with the golf ball and didn’t understand why we kept making her give it back. Zach hung out at the “pano” and found the power button straight away. This kid can turn any machine on and off. Try him sometime. My favorite event was the duck pond. Rissa dutifully reached in to grab the ducks until she got one with a star and won a prize. But Zach! He saw a tub full of water and rubber duckies and knew just what to do! Deciding that it was bath time, he just climbed right in before any of us registered what was happening! He won a prize too 🙂
Potlucks are absolutely impossible with twin toddlers. We know this. You would think that we would be deterred from attending them, but we are not! Here is how we make it work: Jaime holds both twins (often both screaming “eat! eat!”) while Matt gets the stroller or booster chairs set up (which we often left in the van parked several blocks away, so he has to go get them and bring them back). Then Jaime deposits the twoddlers into their seating while Matt cuts everyone else in line to get a plate of food together for the twoddlers. Jaime supervises the twoddlers eating their food (they are obsessed with baked beans, OBSESSED!) in as messy a manner as they can muster while Matt gets into line for real and gets food for Jaime and himself. Jaime doesn’t actually eat her food because she is too busy helping the twoddlers shovel food into their faces and preventing food stealing. You have to be quick if you eat next to your twin and share a plate! Matt takes over and immediately regrets this decision because two hungry kids begin demanding his hamburger, and he has only gotten one bite of it! Jaime takes advantage of Matt’s hamburger misfortune and eats as quickly as possible (thus providing a model of how to shovel food into her face to her ever-observant children). Naptime comes and goes and we consider the fact that we should head home. Cleanup is attempted, failed, and ignored. We shuffle ourselves toward the door, causing waves of people to scoot their chairs in for us because our stroller is WAY too wide for your average church basement potluck. We head home and get our tired and stuffed kids into bed. We immediately erase our actual memories of the event and replace them with the following: “That went really well! I’m glad we went!” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a potluck with our children. If you ever want to experience it first-hand, call us and either 1) we’ll sit with you at one or 2) we’ll send our kids with you and let you manage the fiasco. Maria and Andy and Will sat near us and Maria giggled her way through taking these pictures for us. Because, as you may have noticed, photographing the event is NOT on the list of how to pull off a potluck. Without a kind friend, that part just does not happen.
The rest of our weekend was quiet. We stayed home and cleaned and played and acted like our typical weekend selves. On Sunday, we enjoyed eating dinner with Dave and Hazel. Our kids are finally able to say “Oma and Opa!” and that went over really well with the adopted great-grandparents! I made my first carrot cake (my mom makes a great carrot cake, but somehow, I’ve never done it before on my own) and it turned out yummy! Check out our hand-holding little ones. They melt my heart nearly every day. Adorable!
