July 17 These grands

Wednesday:  I had four very active kiddos today, with some of them being a bit cranky (mostly at each other, but sometimes at me!). We did survive our hours together, though, without any disasters, or major blow-ups; and I found enough strength to get through the day--thank you, Lord. It probably didn't help that I didn't sleep well Tuesday night and so had one of those "headaches." But still, we had a good time together.

The three younger kids did a lot of storytelling today--what do I mean? Well, they would make up stories with the toys and invent different scenarios, i.e. below, Callahan is coaxing DUSTY (the horse) and its rider (DARCY) to jump through the hoop--this was extremely important to dear Cal! I happened to be walking by at the time and he assigned me to be both the horse and rider and make them jump! So, naturally, I did--after a few failed attempts, Dusty and Darcy finally jumped the hoop!

Meanwhile, Mr. Aidan was very intense about making his own 3-D paper airplane ...

... and Erin was into making a sticker picture ...

Brendan found a book he wanted to examine ...

Cal got out our T-Rex puppet (ROCKY) and had him stage a frightful attack on all of the horses ...

... while still demanding that they JUMP through the hoop ... and make it snappy!

You can't believe how long Cal wanted to play this ...

A little later on, Erin got out the magnatiles and all of the kids built houses and vehicles, etc.

But this activity also involved a LOT of made-up stories ... Erin made a very fancy house with lights and a fenced-in back yard ...

Cal was interested in making a vehicle that was going to serve as the family camper ... Aidan was building another house for all of the family to go to when they were camping; however, Cal would hear NOTHING of that plan. The family was going to camp in HIS camper--NOT at a house. Aidan stuck to his guns (of course), and then a huge argument arose about the family's happiness in general ...

I asked them to perhaps ... maybe ... the family could do both--they could camp in the camper, and THEN they could go to Aidan's house to take showers and get cleaned up, etc. Cal did NOT go for this one single bit ...

In disgust, Aidan finally walked away and played in the spare room for awhile where he could be the boss of all the toys back there.

Brendan did some nice sketches at the table ...

We took a break from all of the pretend family stuff and had some Oreo cones together ...

We left to drive back to the Pahman house at about 3:50 in the afternoon. I was kind of thinking that Cal would immediately fall asleep since he had been rather "touchy" the last hour or two--but he did not--he stayed wide awake the whole ride. Once back at their house, we just hung out. The kids took their 30-minute (timed by my watch) turns on the television and Dylan and Kelly arrived home right as that was winding down. I will say that I was super glad to see them! I think we are about halfway through the summer at this point--so far, so good.