Time flies whether you're having fun or not!

Where does time go it flies by so fast these days.  Last week the girls went to Oregon for three days to be in their Aunt Glenda's wedding so while the kids were away grandma played.  Larry and I took a weekday off and toured Chinatown in San Francisco and the other two days I enjoyed a house with all the toys put away!

This week we had to really get into the groove of school.  The girls' have homework Monday through Thursday.  Each day they have nine tasks to complete ranging from having a book read to them, to memorizing and illustrating nursery rhymes.  They are learning to write letters, numbers and words so they practice those things. One assignment last week was to learn your birthday, one was to know your "left".  So we come home from school and spend about an hour doing "schoolwork" and then have lunch.  Now they just have to learn that for all the work we do at home they need to turn it in on Fridays.  Yesterday we went out to Aunt Megan's to play with Audrey and Emily then today we went to a local park that has a water feature~a series of water spouts in the concrete that children can run through, or sit on as the case may be.

We are playing games we haven't seen in this house for many a moon like Go Fish! and Trouble!  Sometimes they both want to play a game and sometimes just one so the dynamics of activities are always changing.  But because they are the same age they seem to pretty much be at the same level so it's so much easier than trying to play with your five year when the three year old wants to play too.

Week 5- Back to School

I REALLY have forgotten what it's like to haul five year old's around in public! They dawdle, they are noisy and rambunctious!  At least for the most part I am too old to care and I realize they to will grow up and become civilized human beings.  This is a very disconcerting time for me as I wake up in the morning and think I should do this-oh I can't I am committed to daycare.  While yes I can still do laundry and clean house while they are here, there are a great many things I cannot do or should I say I don't wish to attempt with them in tow.  I used to go to the temple at least every other week, I can no longer wake up and say today is the day.  I have to plan and work around them.  It is also sad to admit that even with my own kids I hated half day kindergarten- as a mother it is a total waste.  You have to drop everything at 11 am and cater to the kids or least drive over to their school and pick them up.

The girls themselves seem to be acclimating just fine.  They have good days, less than good days and really bad days, but don't we all?  It's just amazing that their bad day can turn my good day into a bad day too!

Week Two- It's Clear Why you don't have kids in your FIFTIES!

The people who wait to have their kids in later life are CRAZY!  Either that or they are so stinking wealthy that the have battalions of people around to actually raise their kids.  We seem to be working onto a pattern of our days- an hour or so of  PBS while the girls actually wake up and I tidy up around the house.  A walk to the park-grandma reads her book and the girls befriend everyone who ventures near the park.  Home for playtime while grandma fixes lunch.  Lunch.  Some story reading time then NAP TIME!  After naps they can watch a show they love called H20.  It is an Australian show about 3 teenage girls who are secretly mermaids.  It is definitely well past the girls age wise, but I have watched a few episodes and it seems benign enough and good always wins out over evil and the mean kid ALWAYS loses.  It is not like a lot of Nick or Disney shows, the kids are not rude, the parents seem pretty wise, virtues like doing well in school and doing your chores are promoted  BUT the bikini's are pretty minimal.


We do have slight day to day variations as in yesterday when at 9:45  grandpa called and announced he was leaving his office for a deposition in Fairfield and he had forgotten he had a court appearance in Hayward at 3:30 so would I rendezvous with him with a dress shirt, coat and tie IMMEDIATELY!  The one snafu was Thursday evening Tash had a friend pick up the girls and she borrowed a car booster seat and Tash did not return it Friday morning.  So after grabbing  grandpa's apparel I climbed a ladder and found an old car seat on the TOP shelf in the garage so poor Maddy had to ride around in an old toddler car seat-which she graciously did even with Bella teasing her mercilessly.  Bella was easily quieted when she heard that we were meeting grandpa on 5th and Broadway-not far from Gunther's Ice Cream where Cait was at work and Maddy deserved a special reward for riding in the car seat-maybe teasing was not going to get her an ice cream!  So we had chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream cones at 10 in the morning!

Since we were out anyway-and grandma desperately needed some stockings (not the Christmas kind which Bella was sure I was talking about) I decided to run to Catherine's with the girls.  What could go wrong running in and buying a couple of pairs of pantie hose?  All went well until we were paying and Bella (quite loudly asks, "Grandma, do you think I have lice?  I itch!"  Every head in the store turned and people slowly backed away until I (loudly answered) "Bella you get lice in your hair and you are scratching your tummy!"

Only two more weeks and the girls go back on track so I can run my errands in the mornings WITHOUT them!

Week One! Survival of the fittest!

I won.  I survived!  I could not have done this six months ago.  Oh, this is not my diet blog this is my babysitting blog so let me start over.

My son has gone back to school to get a California teaching credential in math because that was his major in college.  It is an expensive proposition these days so my school teacher daughter-in-law approached me and asked if I might consider watching their five year old twin daughters when they are not at kindergarten.  Saving daycare costs would help them break even with Tim's school costs.  Since I don't have the money to pay for Tim's education I am willing to pitch in and help him move forward in life where I can.  So Monday, August 15th was my first day on the job.  The girls are "off track" this month which means they arrive at my house between 7:30 and 8:00am and stay until about 5pm.

Not realizing they were starting their sojourn at my house off track I was not very well prepared for them. When they are on-track I will pick them up at 11:00 am at their school and keep them until 5.  So I had just planned on doing a big grocery shopping trip Monday morning and then picking them up on my way home.  Anyway they went to Sam's Club with me and were very well behaved.  I have forgotten what it is like to shop with children who want to walk three abreast with you through the store.  I have gotten pretty good at resisting "please, please, please,"  with "you have to choose one thing and agree on what we get."  It was quite amusing to have two little blonds doing rock, paper, scissors in the aisle when one wants Cheese-its and one wants Goldfish!  Cheese-its won and they were very civil about the outcome.

Next we headed over to Best Buy to pick out Larry's birthday present-a new laptop.  Courtney's boyfriend Eric is the hero here.  I told him my budget, what I was hoping to get and he found it for me.  So we bought one and he took it home and got it all set up with some fancy programs so Larry can watch HD videos on his computer if he wants when he's traveling and Eric did all the basic set up so all Larry had to do was turn it on.  Eric even charged the battery!  Now while Eric is my hero we were walking a very fine line because we are not sure if Bella has ever let anything be a surprise and grandma calls her Bella big mouth for a reason.  We talked and talked about keeping secrets so the next morning when they came and wished grandpa a Happy Birthday before work I really made a big deal about how well Bella kept our secret.  She did really well until that evening when he was opening his presents and as he picked up the big box Bella announced, "Now he's opening his computer!"  Because he had no clue he was getting a computer it really didn't register with him what she was talking about.  Boy was he surprised! 

Luckily we have a park just down the street from our house so we are becoming really familiar with it-grandma just has to remember that at 4pm when it is 95 degrees out the slide is probably 125 degrees.  We try to get to the park early in the day so the girls can enjoy climbing all over stuff.

We also discovered the public library.  It has a lovely children's section and a really cool computer set up for the kids to play on.  It has a color coded keyboard where the vowels are one color, consonants another, and numbers another color.  It is set up on a short table just right for little kids so the girls had fun with it. We brought books home for reading.

Friday I hosted a family dinner party to celebrate Larry's birthday so I was rather occupied most of the day.  The girls decided they would like to build a fort out back so I gave them a couple of sheets and they had a good time and managed to entertain themselves quite well until they were invited in to help Aunt Courtney frost cupcakes. 

Having had four daughters was a good call because now we have six granddaughters so all those Barbie's we saved are coming in handy!

If you notice the dogs are never far from the girls.  I often refer to the dogs as "girls" and the twins often respond so we have to work out our signals around here.

But best of all Maddy and Bella, or Baddy and Belly as grandma goofs up sometimes are never tired at nap time but always manage to get in a good hour and a half to two hour nap!