July 21 At my house

Monday: Tomorrow Dylan and Kelly come home!!! BUT today ... is very FULL with childcare and FUN. Brendan is at a music "camp" over at Calvin from 8am - 2:30 this afternoon. So the three other kiddos came over to my place. This is what we did today at my house.

Cal and I played a game of foosball--it was CLOSE, but Cal won by ONE point! He was thrilled. Aidan and I played a game, but since he doesn't play foosball very often, I creamed him. 

Erin and Cal spent a lot of time in the playroom with the little doll set that my friend, Gloria, gave us last year. They seemed to have a super good time doing this for ... almost an hour!

Aidan, however, was extremely intent upon assembling a difficult 3-D transformer that I keep hidden away, very high in my game closet. It's just that there are SO MANY parts to this crazy thing, and years ago Brendan was able to assemble the entire thing but everyone else was too young yet to play with it. Anyway, Aidan assembled the entire thing today. I was extremely impressed at how tenacious he was with this entire project.

Little Cal went back and forth from room to room and kept himself very contented with all of the various toys.

Cal even set up a nice little dinner table for some of the dolls! Look how darling these two are!

Baby James enjoyed his entire meal fixed especially for him by Chef Cal.

I got out "wolfy" for Cal to play with too. He did a very good job not tangling up his strings ... until the very end. They are not badly tangled, and I will remedy that situation later in the day.

There was a lot of bird watching going on today ... so enjoyable.

Cal and Erin both built with the Magna-Cubes for a very long time today. I think it was our best day ever here in my house!

Erin was so pleased at this little bird she designed ...

Here is a collage of Aidan's building success ... all of these "parts" assemble into two robots--all from separate assembled robots that are numbers 1 - 9. It's difficult to describe and when I TRIED to put it together years ago, it frustrated the daylights out of me. I never did accomplish it. I was so thankful for the hours we spent here today at my house. Everyone ate a good lunch. We watched only minimal TV (Tom & Jerry), and there were no major meltdowns! YES!