The 3 Z's

This weekend was a pretty good one, I suppose. My boyfriend's sister has 3 kids who I absolutely adore. I call them the three Z's. Isaiah, 10 (yes I get that his name starts with an I), Zeke, 7, and Zoe, 5. We all know now that Josh and I aren't married, but they still refer to me as Aunt Alice. I try to see the 3 Z's as often as I can, which isn't all that much because they live an hour away from me. But this weekend, their newly single mother had crazy work hours and no childcare, so I offered to have them come stay with me. Oh what fun we had... (that's in a semi-sarcastic tone).

So life with 3 children in my home in addition to my own child is nothing less of a riot act. It's wonderful preparation for the years I have ahead of me in raising my own son, as well as great prevention of any future pregnancies :-) After dealing with several conflicts over who's turn is first, taking about 13 temperatures, icing various and random wounds and bumps, and picking chewed gum off the carpet in my guest room, I've concluded that there are some crazy people in this world.

Those people are the ones who stand by the Holy Bible phrase "children are a blessing from god." They're kidding themselves.

A message from Alice's New Testament: "Children are a telegram from hell that's informing you to abstain from sex for the rest of your life in order to remove all possibilities of procreation."

Don't get me wrong. I love the three Z's in small doses. In fact, the three Z's are great in pairs... Isaiah and Zeke, Zoe and Isaiah, Zeke and Zoe... but you add a third one into the mix, no matter which one it is, and you find yourself in the middle of a chaotic turmoil that is pretty damn close to topping the world's worst natural disaster to-date (I'm sure the Haitians would be contesting this statement, as would I if I were in their spot :-(....)

So anyway, despite the chaos, we survived the weekend, and had a little fun in the meantime. On Saturday we went ice skating. I thought this would be something fun and low cost to do. it turned out to be just as much work as it was fun.

So the three kids got their snow stuff on, an I bundled Avery up and put him in one of those little pull sleds for babies. He really enjoyed us pulling him down the sidewalk despite the fact that I became a psycho-freak about him falling out of the sled, so I made Zeke crawl behind him in case he started to fall out. Kudos to Zeke for crawling down 3 blocks of sidewalk.

After about 30 minutes of tying the ridiculous laces on ice skates (Hey Volcom brand, ever heard of Velcro???) we finally made in onto the ice. Zoe lasted 1 minute until she fell. Zeke knocked his head off the ice about 10 minutes into the ordeal. Isaiah (mind you, the oldest) insisted on leaning on these crates to keep his balance. Not surprisingly, he lasted 2 hours on skates, not falling once, and holding on to the crates for dear life the entire time. Cautious but smart kid.

So after that we made the long walk back to my house, where Zoe and I made these cute Valentine's Day Cards. They were supposed to resemble little elephants with heart ears.

They turned out more like a "maybe, maybe not" type of Valentine. Maybe it's a kid with really big ears, or maybe it's a hound dog. Either way, we had fun making them.

I tired to get Zeke and Isaiah to be interested in making little owls that said "I'll owl-ways be your friend", but they weren't interested. Darn boys.

Then Saturday night we played this game Josh got me for Christmas called Pictureka. It was pretty fun, although for those of you Pictureka players out there, how do you play it with several children? How do they decide upon what's really a kitchen utensil, or an item found in water? Categories are hard with smart and thoughtful children, mainly because anything can be justified. A giraffe can be considered a water animal, because there's a rare possibility he might end up in a body of water someday. Ughh... reasoning is worse than the triumpth of winning games like these.

Can I also just say that this weekend I learned that any dinner time dilemma can be solved with a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese and a few cut up hot dogs? Processed food is the heart of pre-teen meal preparation. Without it, parents would be burdened with time consuming casseroles and starving children.

So anyway, I had fun with the 3 Z's this weekend, despite my trek over Jay Peak in blizzard like weather to bring them home. I think Avery liked having them here as well. He loves other kids... and something about cousins brings this unspoken comfort and acceptance that you just can't find anywhere else.

Love kids, love family, love Winter... despite the chaos, a great weekend.