Weekend With Daddy

Last year, I went away to a bachelor party weekend and Angie wrote a post about what she and the kids did while I was gone. So, I thought it only appropriate to write a post about my weekend with the kiddos while Ang was away for Aunt Abbie's bachelorette weekend. I took pictures and videos with my phone along the way to send Ang (don't worry, she asked me to, I wasn't just interrupting her relaxing weekend with reminders of home life) and thought I'd use those. Here's what went down...

We started out Saturday morning the way any good Saturday morning starts: at Dunkin' Donuts.

After breakfast, we went to the store to pick up supplies to make Mommy a present for when she got back and some bread to feed the ducks at the playground. We met Uncle Mark, Nora and Audrey at the playground and did a lot of swinging and duck feeding. Mark and I even got to play a round of "Goose Punting" when a few of the larger geese got a little too aggressive with the kids. Who knew you could kick a goose and they'd just come back for more? Here's a video of the kids on the swings. 4 swings and 4 kids means somebody's gonna end up in the special needs swing. It ended up being Madelyn because she was wandering around while the other kids were saddling up. You can barely even see her in there but she didn't care. She thought it was awesome.

 

After the park, we came back home with two very exhausted kids. They both took awesome naps and I got to work prepping the gift-making for Mommy and taking care of some stuff around the house.

Before we got down to the present-making, Patrick wanted to play a few pretend games. This picture was taken when they were pretending to be moles. Patrick thought the dryer was the closest thing to something a mole might go in ("because it's soooo dark, Dad.") so he jumped in and Maddy followed. Patrick kept telling me "we're two moles playing in our laundry hole." Which I went with because it actually kinda sounds better than "the kids are playing in the dryer."

Then we jumped right into making Mommy's present. It's a coupon holder that she can hang on the refrigerator. These pictures were close to the end when most of the mess was cleaned up already. Also notice Patrick wanted an audience and setup Baby Jaguar on the table to watch him. "I'll teach him how to make coupon holders, Dad. He can play with these fuzzy sticks while I'm teaching him."

Cleaning up from craft time got the kids in a cleaning mood and they both started vacuuming (or, going by the first picture, jousting). I love in the second picture that Madelyn is holding her baby doll and vacuuming just like she's seen Mommy do a hundred times (although, she's the baby being held in that case).

Then we made cookies and played and ran and tackled and read and danced.

Madelyn recently started making a scrunchy face that we think is hysterical. It started with just furrowing her brow but has spread to involve her whole face. Because we're super clever, we call it "The Face." I worked this weekend on getting her to do it on command. Yea, I know, I probably could have worked on things like learning a couple more letters and their sounds or saying peoples' names or whatever, but this was way funnier. Here she is in her bath Saturday night doing The Face...

The next morning, Madelyn woke up bright and early so she could spend time squealing at the birds. She does this pretty much every morning. She wakes up before the birds (or any other living thing) and then as soon as the birds outside wake up and she hears them tweeting, she gets really excited and tries to make the highest-pitch tweeting sound she can at them.

We spent the morning and early afternoon at Grandpa and Grandma's for brunch and Grandpa's birthday. It was a beautiful day and the kids had a great time running around in the yard with the big rubber balls and bubble wands Grandpa got. The Beans brought over their fold-up slide and the kids had a blast climbing all over it. Patrick also adopted a caterpillar he kept calling "my chubby little worm" and brought it with him on his shirt or hand wherever he went (including a diaper change) for a good part of the morning.

Judging by the ride home to see Mommy, I'd say they had a good time...