Babysitting and Painting

The past two days we babysat for a two year old boy, Joey, from church. We babysat him all day. He's such a good kid, he was no problem at all. It's always fun to change things up a bit. But there's such a difference in the way he plays versus my girls. I brought in the snow-covered Little Tikes slide and dried it off. He wanted to slide and jump and climb all over it, while my girls wanted to use it to play house.

Then today we went to Plainfield to watch Mark and Julie's kids so they could paint their new house. We got to play with Grace, Hope, and Joy in the morning. In the afternoon, Grace went to the new house to meet a friend who was going to help them. I told Mark and Julie, it's like having a day off when the kids are playing. It wasn't babysitting, it was vacation. After supper, Mike took me by their new house to see the painting progress. They are almost done. It's so cute! Julie's paining everything a khaki-green-ish color. Then the girls' bedrooms are turquoise and robin's egg blue, the master bedroom is chocolate, and the hall bathroom is sunshine yellow. Fun!

We had fun today, but when we got home the girls were tired and went right to sleep!

What a night!

Yesterday Michael went to his brother Mark's new house to put in a thermostat and check the heating/air units. He took along Shane (a guy from our church), who does heating/air. Since he was going to be gone all evening Shane's wife, Melissa, and I got together. Franklin was having their holiday candle walk, so after pizza for the kids we piled into our van to go to town. Every seat in the van was full of car seats! It was a tight squeeze, but we made it. When we got downtown, we wondered if we had the right night because there wasn't any music and not very many people walking around. Finally, we found a table with hot cocoa and cookies in front of the courthouse. The kids had their picture taken with a white miniature horse with reindeer antlers on his head. There were free trolly rides (a wagon pulled behind a tractor). Of course we didn't go...double strollers are a bit cumbersome on a hay wagon! We did go into a really neat toy store, but it was too crowded, so we piled back in the van and went back to Melissa's house. Just as we got to her house, Hannah started choking on a piece of hard candy that an "elf" passed out downtown. She was scared, and I was, too. She had swallowed it whole, but after a cup of water she started to feel better. We decided the best thing to do was to just go home and go straight to bed. What a night!