Weekly Wrap Up - April 2

I started this post on Monday, it's been a busy week LOL, but, better late than never . . .

I've already blogged about most of our adventures last Monday.

Tues and Wed we were at Mama & Papa's house, working on the playhouse, visiting with friends, and, on Wed, celebrating birthdays. Little Bit insisted that birthdays require balloons so my mom found some and the girls had great fun blowing them all up and hung them around.

Papa hung a makeshift rope swing from the "catwalk" on their playhouse (that will eventually have swings hanging from it) and all 3 girls spent TONS of time swinging on it. Even Little Bit was able to stand in the loop of rope and keep her legs stiff enough to swing.

Our birthday dessert was a HIT!! The girls had decided they wanted "chocolate strawberry pie" so we started looking at recipes. What we finally decided on was this recipe for "Death by Chocolate" but with sliced strawberries added to each layer. It was SOOOO good!!! Definitely a keeper!

Thursday we headed home.

Sabbath was an eventful day for Sassy & MiniMe. They had decided several months ago that when they turned 9, they wanted to start helping in Cradle Roll (the class for children 0-4) instead of attending their own class. So, this was their first time helping in Cradle Roll. They were SOO excited, and did a great job! The timing was perfect too. Little Bit was NOT in a good mood. That is especially challenging when Mommy is leading the program. It's not like I can just take her out, if I do that, the whole program screeches to a halt. But since the older girls were there, it worked well. I took Little Bit out to the hall and left her there with MiniMe, who was probably better at comforting her and calming her down than I would be LOL. A couple songs later we were getting ready for her FAVORITE (the parachute!) so I stuck my head out and asked if she was ready to come back, and she was, whew! So much less stressful than if I'd had to hand the program over to another mom and worry about how long we were taking and such. And then Sassy and MiniMe told children story for church. They enjoy doing it, and it's fun to see how much more comfortable they are each time they do it. I wasn't sure how they'd do now that there's a large group of children (ranging from 5 to 12, roughly, though the oldest ones don't always go up for story) from a nearby neighborhood who come for church. That's abit more intimidating than telling a story to 3 or 4 toddler and preschoolers as has been the case in the past, but they did great.

So that was our week.

Oh, one more milestone! Two days before we left for my parents' house, Little Bit announced, at bedtime, that she was going to sleep in Sissies' room. She's said that before but never actually DONE it. She has her own bed in there and sleeps in there for naps, but had never slept there at night. The logistics are complicated since she stays up later than the big girls, and even when I thought about trying to decrease or eliminate nap to move her bedtime earlier, it still seemed challenging since they typically read quietly in bed for a little while, wasn't sure how that would work with her there. . . But when she said she wanted to, I decided to try it. I reminded her that I couldn't lay with her (her bed is right against MiniMe's (both are "featherbeds" on the floor), so for naps I can just lay on MiniMe's bed but that doesn't work when she's already sleeping there. But told her I'd sit at the foot of her bed. She was ok with that, so I sat and read a book while she went to sleep, and slept there all night! It was kind of fun to go in to wake up the big girls the next morning and "surprise" them with their baby sister asleep in their room LOL. She repeated all of it the next night. But then we were at my parents' house. She actually DID ask a few times to sleep with Sissies, but since they sleep on the floor in Mama & Papa's room, and Mama & Papa were still getting ready for bed and such. I wasn't sure what would happen when we got home. The first night she did start toward her bed in our room, but when I asked "are you sleeping in Mommy's room or Sissies?" She changed direction and went to the girls' room. And that apparently was the end of that. She's slept all night every night in the girls's room, and now refers to it as "my room too" instead of "Sissies' room"). It all seemed a little too easy . . . guess she was ready :)