Bowling!

After ice cream and gum extraction, we headed to Midland's bowling alley for some more fun. Grant and Claire were such big kids in their cute bowling shoes. Of course, Laney and Tessa's shoes came off too so that they could be a little bit like the big kids. During this picture, in which all of the cousins are smiling beautifully for the camera, Laney can think of nothing, but trying to get G's shoes on her feet!

Laney loves balls, so when I told her that she got to hold a ball, she got very excited and ran as fast as she could to the rows of balls. Hers was a 6 pounder, so obviously we carried it together!

Not only did this alley have the gutter blocker things, it also had these "rims" that could be placed at the lane making a slide for the ball, so that all Laney had to do was push the ball down the rims and it made it all the way to the pins.

Everyone cheered for her first bowl ever and she got very excited!

She was only really into it for about 2 turns and then she wanted to run around, do snow angels on the nasty carpet and sit in the racecar seats in the arcade. Grant did convince her to help him bowl a few of her rounds with him. He was so sweet and so patient with the little girls. G bowled the rest of Laney's turns himself and ended up getting her the most points!

Tessa was the best cheerleader, clapping for everyone after their turn.

When Laney got really bored, she had to resort to playing babies and crawling in circles around the ball return.

Next Stop Ice Cream!

When Jessica and I were little and my mom was pregnant with Caitlin, we used to go to this ice cream restaurant by our house called Swensen's. It isn't there anymore, but we passed one on the highway on our way to my dad's house and decided that we should definitley take the kids there.
They all got sat in a huge booth coloring waiting for their ice cream to come.

We ordered them the same upside down cone clown heads that we ate when we were little. They were so cute.

Laney discovered that all the walls were mirrored and got pretty distracted by how cute she thought she was!

I am really not sure how many bites of actual ice cream were consumed, because Laney was much more excited about playing with and reconstructing her clown's head. She did love her gum eyeballs, and Tessa's, and maybe some of Claire's. This gum was later found on Jessica's carseat, in Laney's armpit!!!, and tragically in her hair. I couldn't believe this, because she is usually very adept at gum chewing. I did get it all out with minimal damages!

In hopes of diminishing Laney's desire to simply play with her food and convince her to eat it instead, I turned it into a real cone that she could lick. This just made her "toy" more portable thus messy. My dad was horrified at the ice cream dripping everywhere! Laney was climbing all over our booth carrying her cone very precariously over her cousins' heads. I kep telling her to turn it up so that she didn't dump it out, but she thought that I meant to hold it up in the sky, so she looks like an imitation of the Statue of Liberty!

More Fun in Midland

Our third day at Doc's was jam packed with more fun. That morning, I was feeling a little yucky, so Jess and Doc took the kids to the park. I love this picture of all of them walking with him!!

Back at Doc's house, Laney and Tess found plenty of things to occupy themselves with and play with together. We didn't have a lot of toys, but who needs a playroom full of toys when there are diapers to unwrap. and pack and plays to jump around in

and books to read

and doorbells to ring

and kitchens to push strollers through

and opportunities to crawl around playing "babies"

Road Trip!

Last weekend, Jess and I made a spontaneous decision to go to Midland to visit our dad for several days. So we loaded up the car with all the essentials for a 5 hour road trip and three days away from home with our kids, which included.......

2 DVD players

2 sets of headphones

1 laptop with charger

5 dinosaur movies, 2 Magic School Bus movies, 1 Curious George, and 3 Baby Einstein videos

2 pack and plays

3 noisemaking fans

3 backpacks full of books

2 strollers

shameful amounts of junkfood

3 suitcases

2 toy strollers

2 lovies and 2 blankies

3 carseats and 1 booster

2 diaper bags

AND our four sweet children who all did surprisingly well on our road trip! We are so proud of them!

We got in on Monday night and got settled at Doc's house. We walked into his very clean, well organized house.....and despite our very best efforts, it did not look like that when we left. Laney had such a fun week living with her cousins. She and Tessa are like siamese twins lately. Every morning when she woke up, her first question was "Where's Tess??" She love to play with her so much. She is still having a very hard time sharing her toys, no matter how much she loves her sweet cousin. There was a certain spot in Doc's house that has been dubbed "time out" and was occupied more than once by my little two year old!

Many delicious meals have been enjoyed at this table over the years. This was Laney's first breakfast at Doc's. She woke up much later than the Goodyear clan, so she ate alone most mornings.

Our first activity in the adventurous city of Midland was an interactive Children's Museum. It was so much fun with room after room of hands-on games and activities. Laney and Grant were moving all the pieces around on this huge chess board. Laney was black and Grant was white, but the strategy stopped there.

Laney + Tessa = JOY!!!

A tunnel under the stairs, so covert!

Laney and Tess playing in the lamest room of the museum, The Magic Room. Nothing magical about it, but there was a fun lego table to crawl and play on.

A whole room full of games with the history of each game. I am not sure what the history of Connect 4 is, but Laney was captivated.
Laney's frog just wanted to give Tessa kisses.

The kids were serving us food in the mini Burger King. They brought us pizza, hot dogs and even poured us drinks!

The last room that we stopped to play in had a news desk for the kids to simulate a live broadcast. They could see themselves on a T.V. in the corner.

And our very last stop was an outdoor fossil dig. Grant, our dino lover, was in heaven. But even the girls had a great time playing in the sand.

The fun definitely did not stop there. I will post more soon!

My Sous-Chef

Lately Laney has really been loving to help me cook. She pulls her little bamboo stool, brought to us all the way from Taiwan from our friend Ingrid, over to the counter and starts chanting, "help..help!" until I give her a job to do. She is really good about the stovetop and points to it saying, "hot" even when there isn't anything cooking, which I think is great! She talks the whole time that she is helping, saying words like "much" or "yuck" and of course she loves to sample. She has really started saying "thank you" a lot lately even unprompted. It is so sweet to hear. When she says thanks to Todd, she says, "thank you, my daddy" which of course makes me want to cry it is so sweet!

She is helping me put pesto on the crust of our Stromboli in these pictures. Later Todd said that she might have been heavy handed with the brush and put too much, but the pictures suggest that the bulk of the pesto ended up on the side that she couldn't reach, which makes the blame for the liberal brushing fall on someone else......