Weekend in Review

I’ve been wanting to do a “typical day” entry for a while – the kind of day where nothing special happens, but we just hang out around the house. In twenty years, I want to be able to remember what it was like when we had four little kids running around the house. This weekend was as typical as they come, so I’m going to use it as my time capsule journal entry.

***DISCLAMER*** I’m sure it will be very boring for anyone else to read, so proceed with caution or just check back for our next post.

Friday: Nate stayed home from work (that part is actually very unusual) because he was worn out after a full and busy day on Thursday. We were really lazy all day. We watched The Parent Trap with the kids and took a nap and just hung out on our rare, nothing-to-do day. We were a bit more productive in the evening. We mowed the lawns, picked raspberries, made 2 batches of raspberry jam, and watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding after the kids were in bed.

Saturday: The kids slept until 8:30. That is sleeping in at this house. They all came in to snuggle in bed with us for a while. We got up and I made breakfast. Nate took Emily and Ben to the park to practice riding their bikes without training wheels. When they came home we took a family trip to Payless and Walmart, stopped at McDonald’s for lunch, got the car washed, stocked up with 12 loaves of bread at the Wonder outlet, and picked up a bunch of stuff from the team building activity at Nate’s co-worker’s house. When we got home, the kids watched a movie while Abby took a nap and Nate and I did some cleaning projects upstairs. Nate got out his transformers that he has been saving since he was eleven and played with Ben (since he had just gotten his own transformer in his happy meal); the girls played with their littlest pet shop animals; I cleaned a bit more and got my Primary lesson ready. After dinner, we went outside. The kids played while we picked raspberries (again!). We made another batch of jam and YUMMY raspberry shakes. We signed up for Netflix and made our list of the first 20 movies we want to see. Nate and I watched 20/20 that we had recorded the night before and went to bed.

Sunday: Emily woke up with a fever at 4:30 a.m. We gave her some Tylenol, moved her onto the couch, and tried to get some more sleep. Nate stayed home with Emily and Abby and I took Ben and Elise to church. Ben had a sore throat and decided that he was going to be silent all day. He pointed and used some creative sign language while he was getting ready for church. His silence lasted until about 12 minutes into opening exercises. It was the quietest he has ever been in Primary. After church, we had leftovers for lunch, watched the first half of Ben Hur while Emily and Abby slept, made/ate dinner, made peanut butter cookies, did a couple of loads of emergency laundry (thanks to Emily throwing up), played with transformers again and spent some time hanging out in the back yard.

That is life in this house . . . laced with a few tantrums, fights, spills, accidents and several loads of dishes. We love our kids and we love each other and we are very thankful to be living the life we have.

Thank everything for king sized beds! We have some version of this happening every morning, but it is rare to have all the kids in the bed at once. Nate took a picture just for the memory. We don’t look so cute first thing in the morning.

Abby has discovered the usefulness of a step stool. I’ve caught her a couple of times this past week carrying one down the hall. Her favorite thing to do is to collect all of the toothbrushes from the kids’ bathroom countertop. She’ll come out with one in her mouth and one in each hand. Today she scooted a stool over to the kitchen counter to try to get a cookie.

Poor Emily.

Elise loves learning Primary songs and sings them all of the time. She is a cute girl. Two minutes after I typed that sentence, I heard her singing “evah talled to soove ah Ting” as she was sitting on the toilet.