Today was a bit crazy. It started off yesterday. Yesterday we did a gingerbread contest (our house won 3rd place!) where I was reminded that, for the party today, we had to bring a dessert of some sort and found out that we were also supposed to bring along some sort of finger food or something. After lunch (at Chick-fil-a where the gingerbread contest was held) we went to pick up stuff to make the necessary food went home and put kids down for a nap and tried to catch up on a little stuff at home and before I knew it, we had to leave for "Bethlehem". A church about an hour away has a wonderful live town of Bethlehem including the nativity which SOMETIMES has a live baby for Jesus. This year they did not. For goodness sake, Jesus is the main character and in this LIVE nativity, they couldn't get a LIVE baby?! I digress. We did that last night, got home pretty late, flopped into bed. I made some spinach dip with the bag of fresh spinach before we left so that was taken care of and I figured that I would bake brownies as soon as I got up in the morning so they'd be ready for the party at 9.
Wouldn't you know, I got up this morning and La Princess was in her bed yelling/crying "Mom!! I'm poooop!" I went to get her and YIKES! I couldn't tell where the leak was right off so I carried her superman style to my bathroom only to discover that the leak was in front and now my carpet and i both required cleaning. Argh!! So after bathing her, washing the carpet, taking a shower myself and doing a load of laundry I could finally do the brownies. Thoughts of calling it off were dancing through my head (forget the sugarplums, okay?!) but of course I had already told them we were going and I hated to disappoint.
We arrived at the church for the party about 25 minutes late, Little Bit had taken her shoes and one sock off (and it was pretty chilly out so I hated to haul her in like that...) and La Princess was SO not cooperating with anyone. It's okay though, we were there and things were bound to smooth out a bit.
I spent much of the 3.5 hours we were there with one little lady on my back and one in my arms. Both were tired, one would have been best left at home or just about anywhere else in my opinion. All in all, it was one of those things where my arms were given a workout, my patience was given a work out and I was rather looking forward to going home. I felt somewhat frazzled, especially by the time they got around to eating, which was the last activity for the party. At that point Little Bit had been stretched beyond her limit and was way tired. La Princess wanted mom, wanted her carseat, wanted to go home and whatever happened, did NOT want me to do anything but sit and hold her.
Interestingly, I had one lady come up and tell me she saw us in the grocery store and complemented the kids on how well behaved they were and how they all just stepped to the side and got out of the way when other people were coming down the isle without me having to say anything. She also said we all looked so calm, etc. You know what that reminds me of? You know those stories you hear about people smuggling Bibles into other countries and the border guards don't even look in the box with the Bibles or perhaps they do but they don't seem to see the Bibles? That's what this seems like. Like they're missing something that's so obvious I can't believe it's not some sort of trick. Because I don't think there's a time in the grocery store where I don't have to instruct my kids to step aside and watch out for people. And calm!! It's true, I don't yell at my kids in the grocery store. I actually drop my voice and hiss at them! Ha! Not really, but I do drop my voice to correct them in public. I don't much like hearing people chew out their kids, myself. Really though, I'm amazed that it seemed calm to her. I always figure people see us coming and it's like a small tornado coming down the isle, you know?! With little heads flashing out from time to time, a hand shooting out there to grab something off the shelf, and on down the twister goes. Perhaps I had just issued a death threat and they were all contemplating how serious I might be. Or, maybe, like in those missionary stories, she really just didn't see it! I always worry that I'll be a bad testimony to the world as related to having a larger than average family. Maybe that's how God takes care of that!
Back to the party. First they had a craft. Three of the boys made some baseball game, my little engineer chose a more complicated car to do and La Princess and I did a mailbox sort of thing. Here are a few carpenters, busy at work.
They also had a cupcake walk. Sheer numbers worked in our favor there (or worked against us as bringing home cupcakes isn't the best thing in the world) and we won twice, netting us twelve large chcolate/candy coated cupcakes. Here are a couple of pictures of the boys during the cake walk.
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