With all four grand kids in the house there was only one thing to do: Dance Party!!
I had made ginger snaps before dinner so we had all kinds of provisions to dance the night away and that’s what we did. Ty and Megan came to pick up their kids so the party ended at 10:00, which is several hours past BoopityBoop’s bedtime. I had their bedroom all ready for them and tucked them in before Ty’s truck hit the highway.
The girls fell asleep right away and I heard not a peep until 3:30 a.m., when Boopity woke up with a dirty diaper. Obviously, she had to be changed so I took her out on the porch, where her yelling wouldn’t wake her sister. I ran back into the bedroom to grab a diaper, wipes etc and without thinking, pulled the heavy door to the porch closed behind me, crushing the first two fingers on my left hand. If Boopity hadn’t been so caught up in her own distress, she would have learned a whole lot of new words that night.
Friday morning I gave the girls their breakfast, then left them with Jay and Josie, who had come over to help out. She loves hanging with her nieces and nephews. I had painting to do.
We met out at the Arboretum and it was raining! It was gorgeous! We met near the base of the hill covered in sculptures. There’s a structure beneath which we could stand, to keep out of the rain. I love painting in the rain, it’s so beautiful! I tried to get the misty, grayed out atmospheric look of the day. I got sort of close but did not nail it. After lunch, we moved to the Ordway pavilion, overlooking the bog. The red barn peeks over the tree tops from a hill across the bog. The view was glorious.
When I got home, the girls were napping. Josie hung around until she had to go to work.
We had the twins with us until Sunday afternoon. They ate like champs and slept beautifully. Boopity was overly tired after all the excitement of Thursday night and didn’t want to go to bed on Friday, either. She and I had a nice hour, just the two of us, before I convinced her to go to sleep. Once she went down, she slept for ten hours.
The weather was gorgeous while they were with us so we went to the park, where we met two more sets of twins! One was a boy/girl set who were three and a half and the other were little boys of about seven months. I put BoopityBoop in the chair swing together. They seemed to like it. Boopity tried to dance to the squeaking of the chains. Boop didn’t seem to trust the swing. She grabbed the chains on both sides of the swing, as though she were afraid she and her sister would slide out.
We played a lot at home, including putting an inch or two of water in their little wading pool. After the last time, I’d emptied it and put it under a tree beside the deck. Boopity caught sight of it, made the sign for ‘more’ and asked “pease?”, so of course we had to go swimming.
Katie had left us a pair of carseats in case we wanted to take the girls anywhere, so Saturday we tossed the double stroller in the van and took the girls to walk around the lake. Sounds easy, right? I buckled the seats into the car only to discover that the straps were adjusted for much smaller children than the girls are. So I had to take the seats out again and figure out how to adjust the straps. After a good look at the seats, it was pretty easy to figure out how to adjust them but it took me a very long time since I was working with two freshly squashed fingers on my left hand, which were throbbing like a mother flockasheep. What should have taken fifteen minutes took me nearly an hour and a half but eventually we got the seats in the car, the girls in the seats and the whole parade down to the lake, where we had a beautiful walk.
Sunday, we were all invited to a pool party at Steve’s house, where BoopityBoop got to see a bunch of their cousins, including another set of twins: Steve and Pam’s grandsons, M and G, who are nine! Boop wasn’t interested in going in the water; she just wanted to trot around the perimeter of the pool constantly. Boopity was willing to go in the water with Josie. We all had a fun time until we got a text from Katie alerting us to meet them at our house.
As usual, Boopity Boop were happy to see their parents and didn’t argue when it was time to get in the car and go home but they would have been perfectly content to have stayed here with us, as well.
I was breaking down the pack-n-plays in the little bedroom and Jay was at his computer in the kitchen. He asked me if I’d rather have steak or chocolate chip cookies.
“For dinner or forever?” I asked. “If I had to give up one of them, I think I’d rather give up steak but it would be hard. Why do you ask?”
“We haven’t talked to each other in four days, I just wanted to start a conversation.”
From food, we moved on to music and many hours later, I went to bed while he was still trying to figure out the playlist for his favorite twenty songs.