The girls woke up and immediately started playing with their cats and rats.
Cats can be a bother at breakfast, though.
It was 35 degrees Fahrenheit early in the morning. It was 47 degrees when the girls were ready to go outside. They chose to stay inside, so we read for two hours.
Hannah even took a turn reading to Gray.
I've had these tactile type of books for both my girls, and they've liked them ok, but they are essential for Gray. I've doubled the number of books with interesting textures since he's started showing interest - he loves them.Sometimes they even require getting up close.
When it was warm enough, the girls went out to the trampoline to play - with the cats and rats of course.
It was a game with rules to complicated for me to understand. Two rules I did get were 'If you jump on a rat, you have to sit down for an hour.' and 'If you jump on a cat it becomes rat protection for the next rat you jump on.'Then cousins (different cousins than the day before) came over to play. All of the kids got two pony rides. One in the afternoon without saddles and a much, much longer one later in the evening with saddles. Very exciting stuff.
Lots of cousin play. My kids see these cousins every time they come to Grandma's house and think of them as an essential part of the visit.
Popsicles are essential.
That's as close to 'sit down to eat your popsicles' as you're going to get four kids.Then, as a bonus, the cousins spent the night! So this morning they've watched some PBS (Sesame Street is not as good as I remember, but the song still makes me happy.) Now they're playing Bambino Dino, Harvest Time, and Granny's House. It's cold outside.
It was 'stuck'.
For a long, long time.
Later today she told me "It wasn't like swashbuckling after all, Mother. It was like Diego." There you have it.
And then there was the 'train', a contraption that we made for Matt's father a few years ago and brought in to the reunion.
It was fun.
A lot of fun.
There was independent play while parents were involved in what seemed to be never-ending chatter.
Homer the Clown came. He came to our 
I say 'most' because I couldn't tell if Grayson liked it. He never looked away and his face looked like this the whole time.
After Homer left, we had a family auction with donated items to fund the next year's reunion. I won a fantastic quilt (which Ains promptly fell asleep on) ...
and these absolutely darling cow tea towels.
I say 'won' because I don't want to admit how much I spent. So don't ask.
Meanwhile, Hannah found out who'd won the kitty cat embroidered tea towels that *she* had wanted ("One of them was planting flowers, Mother!") and went to go look at all seven of them.
Then it was time to go back to my husband's parent's house to do milking duty so Hannah did one last activity before we left - she got a Super Soaker.
And then she got in the truck.
Hannah made her a 'Birthday Monster'.
"Once 'pon time dere was a dagon." (Very into dragons these days.)
This morning Hannah asked if *she* could do a craft. Because I'm brain-dead from making too many dolls, I asked her if she had any ideas. She suggested painting on wood with acrylic paint. I revived my brain long enough to come up with another idea. I do *not* need to be wrangling acrylic paint while I'm stuffing doll legs, thank you very much.
And so did Ainsley.
While they did that, I rounded up some supplies. Felt, the button jars (of course), thread, stuffing, yarn ... And then we set to work 'interpreting' the pictures.
Ainsley couldn't do much but explain to me what the different parts of her drawing were ("It's a COWBOY monster, Mommy!"), but every so often, a set of little pudgy hands would try to help me sew a button on here or do some embroidery there.
Once we had all of the embellishments and expressions added, we stuffed them. First we used all of the felt and thread scraps and then we added in stuffing.
She had an absolute blast doing this project and has three more monsters (and another one 'just for GrayGray') laying on the counter, drawn up and ready to go.
"She so coooot!" was what Ainsley said when she'd inspected the final project.
She wants a ballerina monster next.
And her mother, for all of the sense she talked into me over Ainsley's monster, did a heckuva job making a patchwork monster to match the picture.
Think 'monster bird. It's so fun. Very tactile. The ribbon hair (above the black face) is so sweet - little pigtails.
So my sister - because she's awesome - put it on the monster. When I was taking the picture of the monster, my niece asked "What's this thread?" pulling on the yellow thread. "That's the pee, of course," I answered. She dissolved into giggles.
Don't ask me how. I couldn't go back.
