Mommy Daycare

This week, I had the opportunity to keep a friend's 5-year-old and 3-year-old for about 24-hours. My friend needed to paint her house and air it out for the night before her kids came back home, so Daniel and Laura came over Tuesday morning, played all day, and stayed over for a big sleepover. I was a little uncertain about how it would all go: me with a 5, 4, 3, and 2-year-old, but it went surprisingly well. Like any challenge, I approached it with a plan: I wrote down a long list of actitivities and kept it on hand, so anytime conflict became a problem or the kids were bored with what we were doing, we cleaned up that stuff and moved to something else.

We started out with a Little People Village, which is what I call it when I get all of the Little People toys off the shelves and put them in a big circle in the playroom. Then we played with Play Dough, had snacks, played on the deck in the sandbox and came back in for lunch. After lunch, we got out the Thomas train set and Ethan went down for a nap. When they got tired of the train set, I let the three older kids watch a Winnie the Pooh video for the rest of Ethan's nap. When Ethan got up, we had a snack and then got out coloring books, crayons and markers. When that got old, we made a fort out of the dining room table. By this point, Ethan was very tired of only getting 1/4 of my attention, so he wandered upstairs to hang out with Aunt Wendi, since her attention was not so unacceptably divided.

When Ethan rejoined us, we played a rousing game of Lion Chase...Ethan was the lion and the other three ran the loop through the kitchen and living room with the little lion in hot pursuit. Marcus came home from work early at 5:30 so he could take Caleb to his swim lesson while I kept the other three and cooked dinner. While Caleb was gone, me and the other three kids read books together and did some puzzles. We had a late dinner at 7:00 after Marcus and Caleb got home. After dinner, we switched to zone defense...I did the dishes while Marcus manned the play room. Then Marcus bathed and bedded our boys in our bedrom while I put Daniel and Laura down in the boys' room.

After all four kids were asleep, we emerged from our respective rooms and were amazed that it was only 8:30 pm. We had the whole evening in front of us! But we were pretty beat, so we just talked for a while, watched 24, and went to sleep.