Baby Bliss

My dear husband told me the other day that I needed to stop wishing for disaster to happen just so I could blog about it. This conversation brought me back to last summer, when David was just 11 months old. We were vacationing in Hatteras, North Carolina on the beach and I had decided I wanted to "scrapbook the summer". I was keeping my eye out for interesting photo opps and my poor baby became the object of my scrapbooking obsession when he fell face first into the sand. Instead of comforting my screaming son (screaming seems to be a theme for him), I was snapping pictures as fast as I could. I fondly remember my husband being quite furious at me for that. I did get some cute shots of David's anguished face covered in sand - never quite got them into a scrapbook. Waste.

Anyway, back to real time...It currently looks like a toy store detonated in our house. I walked into the living room this morning to find David sitting in the midst of the rubble, having rounded up all the Hot Wheels stash. We had Anthony's 5 year old birthday party last night.

The party was held at a mini golf course complete with the accents of water features everywhere. The babies were beside themselves with excitement over the prospect of both water and rocks being an option for them. Dave supervised David for a bit while I played birthday party security. I seriously came back and found that my son had entirely removed a border of rocks from around a feature and thrown them all into the nearest stream! You could see the emptiness of where the (pretty large) rocks had neatly rounded out the edge of the 18th hole. When questioned, my husband retorted with some sort of a "boys and fathers bond over throwing rocks into water" answer...

As demolition twin was busy finding things that could be thrown into water features, mother twin was running around trying to make sure the party was going smoothly. She walked around the tables doing her own checks, making sure napkins were not left on the ground. I even caught her picking individual pieces of confetti up out of the grass. She must have spend a good half hour on that task - boy, did she put a dent in our clean up work!

All in all it was good birthday experience. The normal stuff: too many kids, too much pizza, green faces from the cake frosting, way too many toys... I think my favorite moment was when my mother tried to round up the sugar smashed children from their random tag game to play an organized round or two of "duck, duck, goose". It started traditionally enough, one kid was the "duck" and he walked around the circle to determine whom he would "goose". The whole thing quickly turned bad when about 4 other kids stood up to try to be the duck all at once. My mom was ballsy, I will give her that.

We spent the morning sorting new toys. Then we pulled out "Super Mario Smash Brothers". Darling Husband got him that one. It's amazing how everyone just settles into video games. A few months ago, Dave decided he wanted to play the newest Zelda game. He hadn't played a video game in probably years, for some reason he got the game and wanted to beat it. He had our three kids absolutely mesmerized for (I'm embarrassed to say) hours! They loved to just stare at the screen as Dave went through the world's, reading the character's lines out loud to them. The babies favorite part was when the monkeys were on the screen - they would jump up and scream "monkeys! monkeys!" Anthony just continued to try to give Uncle Dave "tips": "Uncle Dave, this guy is really hard, you have to hit him just right" or "I think you're going the wrong way Uncle Dave" - always so helpful :)

So, "Super Mario Smash Brothers" was a great hit in our house this morning. Ava was beside herself when a controller wasn't handed out to her. She kept trying to take Anthony's until we found an old xbox controller to give her. I swear she thought she was really playing with that thing! I wish you could have seen how serious her face was during the matches. When he came in 2nd and Uncle Dave came in 1st, Anthony explained that he won because he had more points (2 vs. 1). We let him have that one - a brilliant deduction, we thought.

At least the babies are finally feeling better. I'm happy to report that the worst is behind us!