Tired Children

Lauren and Brayton are tired. Tired from traveling to their Grandma's houses. Tired from all the fun activities. Tired from a long weekend. Sometimes I think I'm more tired after taking a week off work for vacation than I get from working. I think it is because you get out of your routine.

Well, our children are out of their routine. Today is Memorial Day and we went to some friends house for brunch. This is an annual event, everyone has kids about the same age (Rory Freyermuth is 6 months, and Drew and Jace Beall are 6 years old). There are actually four kids born within a month of Brayton. The kids play and play and have a great time.

Lauren was so tired at Matt and Jodi's that she was sitting in the middle of the living room floor playing when all of a sudden her head started bobbing forward. She kept nodding forward only to sit up, look around then nodd again. Her little face got within about two inches of the floor. She almost fell asleep between her two little feet. At that point we decided it was time to come home.
After 2 hour naps for Brayton and Lauren we played some more outside around the water table. After a while I brought Lauren in and stripped her down to her diaper. We played catch with her pink ball then she simply laid her head on the ball and fell asleep. It was 6pm.

I jumped up to get the camera to record this sleepy little girl and unfortunately woke her up. After looking at me groggily for a few seconds, her older brother burst into the house from outside and she was ready to play again. You can see her clapping at the end of the video. Turn the volume up, it's really quite cute.

Weekend at Grandmas (both of them)

Being that this is Memorial Day weekend Colette and I decided to make a quick 3 day trip back home to Mallard and Pomeroy to see everyone. We left on Friday and stopped in Pomeroy to see Grandma Dorris and Grandma Bernadine before continuing on to Mallard for the night. We went to Grandma Bernadine's and Grandpa Wayne's house and ate some lunch. We played and had a great time conversing with them. Brayton is becoming very fond of his great Grandparents. After eating lunch, we went to the care center to see Grandma Dorris. When we got there, Grandma was eating her own lunch. She decideed she wasn't hungry anymore so we wheeled her into the TV room in front of the birds. There Brayton and Lauren proceeded to play for about a half an hour. Throwing the beach balls back and forth and watching the birds in the cage. It seemed that Grandma Dorris had a great time watching them. She got to eat a piece of my birthday cake that Colette had baked and she ate more of the birthday cake than I think she ate of her meal. After playing for a bit Grandpa Gordon came on his lawn mower to mow the care centers lawn. Brayton thought that was really neat seeing Grandpa on such a big machine. He was a little scared of it, but did think it was pretty cool to see Gradpa driving the lawn mower. After spending about an hour with Grandma Dorris we decided to move on to Mallard. The kids were very excited to go to "Gradma Coke's" house as Brayton calls it. The kids fell asleep a couple miles outside of Pocahontas so that meant they did not get any naps once we arrived. They played and played at Grandma & Pappa Anderson's and had a ball. We got to watch plenty of Baby Einstin movies, the kids took a bath and then crashed out at about 8pm. They were so tired neither made a peep until abot 7am the next day. After dinner we took off for Pomeroy to go to Grandma Cindy's house. Once again, they fell asleep just south of Pocahontas, so with no naps we pushed our way through another owly afternoon. We made our way to the Pomeroy school to play at the park. We then went over to Uncle Nicks house. Brayton was very excited to see him. Uncle Nick had just finished golfing 63 holes that day and after a brief visit, Nick headed off to go fishing. We then decided to go over to Uncle Dustin's house where Lauren and I got to swing on the porch swing. Lauren loves to swing. Uncle Dustin let Brayton water his garden and flowers. B thought this was great fun and shortly there after Uncle Matt and Aunt Audra arrived. Between Uncle Matt and Uncle Dustin doing "tosses" with Brayton and him watering the garden, Brayton threw a fit when the time came to leave. The kids did not sleep well at all Saturday night. Lauren was up at least three times, and Brayton was also up 3 times. Sunday we all went to mass, and Brayton got to run his dollar up to the alter and put it in the basket. This is something he always wants to do whenever we go to St. Marys. He never forgets the fun of doing this. After Mass we got to see a couple of friends. Troy Lenz had his daughter there, "Ava", she is about 2 months older than Brayton. After a few minutes he lost interest and went outside with Grandpa Gordon. Carrie Lenz was also there, she got to hold Lauren for a bit. But Lauren is quite the wiggle worm and in a minute or so was down on the ground crawling around. After mass, we went back to the care center to see Grandma Dorris. We saw her for about 15 minutes, but she was very tired today. After a bit she asked us to take her back to the lobby for lunch and she was too tired to play. I hope she gets some good rest today and feels better tomorrow. We ate lunch at Grandma Bernadines and as always it was very good. Once lunch was over, we traveled back to Des Moines. Brayton and Lauren fell asleep for about an hour or less in the car, so 3 days with out quality naps hopefully means they will sleep in until 8am Monday morning. After we got home to W. Des Moines, we made a quick trip to Costco then put out the water table and the kids had a great time playing outside. All in all it was a hectic weekend but we had alot of fun.