If you go to our earlier posts you'll find a similar video of Ashlyn falling asleep at the dinner table. Now it is Ashlyn's turn to laugh. We babysat for some family friends for a couple of weeks starting at the end of June and poor little Claire did a lot of her naptimes in the car, and was busy growing four of her molars at once. We watched three kids ages 11, 15, and 18 and they were so fun. It was a mind stretching experience jumping into dealing with instrument lessons and practicing, chores, friends, curfews, and eating ice cream at midnight instead of park days, potty training, hair-pulling (one of Claire's favorite revenges) and time-outs. I confess eating Ice cream at midnight wasn't too bad although my OBGYN will not be too happy with me since she told me that I should not have a goal to weigh over 200 lbs with this pregnancy. It cracked me up because one night I was trying to convince the two oldest that they should probably just go to bed, and they pulled out the line, "come on you didn't have ice cream late at night after dances?!" I'll have to come up with a good retort to that question and anything similar to it before Ashlyn is a teenager. If you can't beat them, join them I always say. Luckily they had a good assortment of ice cream that was able to heal my wounded ego. In many ways, housesitting was sort of like a little vacation for me. The 11 year old Charity was the greatest nanny in the world, Ashlyn loved being with her three new friends, we got to practice swimming in their pool everyday, I had lots of kitchen/cleaning help from everyone, I had fun talking and playing with all the kids, and their chocolate lab occupied a lot of Claire's time and attention. For some reason I didn't take a lot of pictures, but here are some highlights.
Claire's favorite little hiding spot was behind this door/window shade. A great spot for a little light reading. (Can anyone guess that book?...hint "dum ditty dum ditty dum dum dum")
I uploaded this picture small so you can click on it and hopefully see a close-up of Ashlyn's face of unequivocal terror. (My brother Spencer requested that I document this facial expression). She gave me the thumbs-up after to let me know how fun it really was going down their fast slide.
Here are all the local cousins with Aunt Becca for the 4th of July fireworks, and here is a picture of the supernanny.
