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!