Parenting x4

For Christmas last year all the employees at Jeff's work got together and gave Rob, the company owner, a weekend away with his wife. The plan was to pay for Rob and Haley to have a night at a hotel and give them some spending money for eating out and entertainment. One key to creating a much-deserved, stress-free night away was to arrange for free childcare for their children (for those who haven't been keeping up that would be Cobb - 4.5, Charly 2.5 and Ridge 14 months).

The answer to that dilemma: me and Jeff! Why of course we would watch them...we live close, we aren't total strangers and we have managed to keep our own child alive for almost an entire year. Truly, we were almost overqualified for the job.

Rob and Haley were gone from Friday afternoon to Saturday night so that gave us about 30 hours to try to keep four children from electrocuting themselves, burning down the house or falling down the stairs and splitting their heads open.

I'm thrilled to report that not ONLY did we manage to make it through the weekend without losing one of them, all kids were clean, well-fed and relatively happy when our shift was complete. Success!

Truly, the Thomas kiddos are absolutely fabulous and we had a great time with them. Cobb and Charly are a riot and Ridge is a wonderfully laid back and happy baby. They were great listeners, went to bed without a fuss and were kind to each other and to Bennett. They couldn't have been better.

Here are a few pictures from our weekend (I'm so sad to have not taken a picture of the four kids together!).

Bennett and Ridge getting clean. I'm sure they will thank us for these pictures later. Ha!

The little boys are such cute playmates.

I discovered I am completely inept at doing a little girl's hair. Sweet Charly was patient with me as I tried at least three times to get her little pigtails somewhat symmetrical. I never did get it quite right.

Sadly for us, Charly spent most of Saturday with at her cousins' house. It was nice of the family to arrange for us to have one less child to watch but we missed her!

These boys love to eat!

Cobb licks a yogurt lid and shows off his war wound from roughhousing with Jeff in the backyard. He so kindly described the incident to his parents as "Jeff accidentally scratched me with his shoe". This is a euphemism for "Jeff kicked me in the face."


Saturday afternoon was beautiful and so we took a walk to the park with the babies in the double stroller, Cobb on his bike and dog Mulligan in tow.

Jeff played with Cobb on the swings, slide and climbing gym while I tried to entertain two non-walkers and keep them from eating the ground cover.

I was not terribly successful. Oh well, extra fiber...right?

My mom called Saturday night to see if we survived our parenting experiment. She asked "do you still think you want four kids?". I'm not scared off yet. But maybe we'll try to arrange to not have four that are all under the age of five.

Wish us luck!