Friday Family Fun: Doing Without Daddy

A. had his own fun this Friday doing some masonry work (that's not sarcastic--that genuinely is fun for him), so it was up to me to make fun for the four kids.

And me, but I don't ever anticipate actually having fun myself. That way, I'm always pleasantly surprised when I do.

Anyway.

I was planning on taking them up to the new house after Poppy's morning nap, but despite many attempts, she refused to actually take one. And in the process of trying to get her to sleep, the boys got bored and started fighting and it was getting ugly.

So I made the executive decision to give up on the morning nap and haul the whole crew up to the new house right then.

I quickly threw some stuff in a bag for a picnic lunch--a chunk of cheese and a knife to cut it with, Nut Thins crackers, salami, a bag of grapes, and water bottles--made sure the stroller was in the car, and loaded the whole happy lot of them up for our admittedly lame adventure.

When we got there, I turned Poppy over to her brothers while I went into the house to do some work on the hallway walls.

Don't worry. I made sure she had a plastic bottle to keep her entertained.

Although with these three maniacs racing around, who needs more entertainment?

I left instructions with Cubby to come get me if she got too fussy and went inside to start sanding the spackle and washing down the walls of the hallway.

Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about the (yet MORE) brown carpet.

When we bought this house, A. remarked that it was nice it was so clean, considering it was occupied by a bachelor. Bless his heart, A. is a bachelor himself in perspective if not actual fact, so he didn't even notice that the place was not actually clean. Had he seen the black water I kept having to dump out as I washed the walls, he would not have been so positive.

Anyway again.

I got about twenty uninterrupted minutes before Cubby came in to announce that Poppy was getting fussy. I told him to wheel her over to the house in her stroller, thereby buying me another five minutes. And then he volunteered to push her around outside and keep her happy for another fifteen minutes or so. This meant that she only crawled around my feet and cried for a few minutes at the end while I finished up.

A portrait of the neglected child and her mean mom.

After I finished my self-imposed task, I set up the picnic lunch for everyone.

This bench A. made is a perfect children's picnic table.

The boys were pretending that they were eating at a cafe. I brought them their water bottles, and they called me the waitress.

Not too far from the truth, as a matter of fact. Although the tips around here are terrible.

Charlie while watching the leaves blow briskly away in the wind, "Do you think they're fleeing from winter?"

I let them play a little longer in their fort/ship/tractor/whatever its current incarnation was:

Otherwise known as A.'s trailer.

I finally took pity on the drooping baby and took them all back to the house with a crib so she could have a much-needed nap.

Unfortunately, the much-needed nap only lasted a piddling 45 minutes. Fortunately, her brothers had set up an elaborate ship game on the front porch that provided plenty of opportunities to crawl around and grab things.

She was allowed to do this because she was the princess in the game. As in real life.

And that was pretty much it for the fun this Friday. It would have been a lot more fun without The Incredible Fussing Baby, but that's the way life goes sometimes.