Dad's In Charge

Yesterday Megan drove down to Kentucky with her mom for a Stampin' Up party hosted by one of Megan's customers. Since Megan's Stampin' Up business is privately held it's tough to get an accurate estimate of the financials, but, I'm guessing it's pretty lucrative. I'm glad I'm married to the best demonstrator in the world.

Megan's day-trip south, left me in charge of all 4 of us children--er, the 3 kids and me. So, I did my best to equal Megan's exceptional parenting ability. Let me start off by saying that last weekend Megan had a bout with strep throat--which left me in charge again. Somehow, we all survived that little episode, so Megan was somehow confident enough to try leaving me in charge a second time.

Let's see how I did:

We started off the afternoon with a bike ride down to the neighborhood park/playground. Ali is really a whiz on two wheels now, and Kaitlyn is as confident as anyone on her bike with training wheels. Max is a very supportive stroller passenger. After about 15-20 minutes at the park, the kids were hungry so we returned home.

When we got home, the kids insisted on eating Extreme Moose Tracks ice cream. Hey, I'm not a bad dad; they were still hungry, so I gave them a second bowl full.

Since I put Max down for his afternoon nap, and Ali and Kaitlyn were all sugared up from lunch, I had to find a way to put their energy to good use. We decided to play a game of Jenga. Since, we don't own Jenga, we had to settle for its cheap and generic equivalent, which we do own: Rainbow Tumbling Tower. We played several rounds before discovering that it was actually more fun to knock the pieces down than to set them up. So, we decided to use the pieces as dominoes. Ali got all of the yellow and blue pieces; Kaitlyn got all of the red pieces. Dad's job was to make sure that no one knocked each other's pieces down before they were ready to be knocked down. However, we soon tired of constantly cleaning up the pieces.

Max woke up and we moved on to the game of Twister. The first matchup was Dad vs. Alison. Kaitlyn controlled the spinner and shouted out the commands: "Blue!" When we asked her what was supposed to go on blue, she responded with a puzzled look on her face. We played a free form version of Twister. Ali won by pushing me over. That left Ali and Kaitlyn in the championship battle. I'm not sure who officially won, but from the photo below, I would probably guess that Kaitlyn lost.

Max looked on with the fat lip he got on Friday. (That will teach him to take on a sidewalk twice his size!)

After Twister, we went for another bike ride which led to playing with friends in the cul-de-sac for 90 minutes. When I was lambasted for recommending we let our friends go eat dinner (and go eat dinner ourselves), I was shunned. I suggested that they could say "Dad, thanks for letting us play" and refer to me as "Best Dad Ever", but they seemed unenthused by my ideas.

Dinner went extremely well: I didn't burn the Bagel Bites so badly that they were inconsumable.

After dinner, I loaded the kids up in the car and hauled them off to Home Depot so I could purchase some new blinds for our bathroom (What? Butcher paper taped over the windows isn't fashionable?) as well as some other home improvement essentials.

After reading scriptures together, I put the kids to bed only 30 minutes late and began work on my house projects and general house cleaning, vacuuming, wiping and straightening so that Megan would be pleasantly surprised when she got home. Unfortunately, Megan made it home just before I finished doing the dishes (although she was genuinely surprised by the blinds and other projects I was able to complete).

In summary, Megan is amazing, and I'm grateful for everything she does for our family. Please don't let her go out of town again.