Grandchildren Spoiled While You Wait

We had a great weekend! While Eric and Brooke spent the weekend celebrating their 5th wedding anniversary, so we had Alaura stay at our house. After anticipating this for about a month and thinking about where she would sleep, we went to Babies R Us and bought a toddler bed.

When Friday night finally came I couldn't wait to show Alaura her bed. Make that her "princess bed"! Needless to say, she loved it. We had a wedding reception to attend that evening, so she was late getting to bed but when it was time to get ready she went right into her routine and taught me how it went. She didn't want to settle down, in fact she was rather wound up. I kept trying to get her to settle down, but to no avail. Finally I just went out and shut the door and she eventually settled down and went to sleep.

We all slept in until 9:00 and then had pancakes for breakfast. The first thing on the agenda was to head for the Beach Club to go swimming. She patiently waited for me to get this shot of her before she got in the pool, which was amazing as she hardly stopped moving the whole weekend. I started to wonder if she is part shark!

I didn't have any pool toys to bring but no problem - Alaura found two "pineapples" that she threw into the pool and since they floated, threw them over and over and over again for me to retrieve. After doing that forever, I mean about 20 min I was tiring of that so I tried to think of some other things to do with them. When I made them "kiss" Alaura thought that was the funniest thing ever!

After the swimming we went home and made a FORT!! (That's right, Amberly, we made a fort)

I gave her a little bag of baby carrots, a book and a flashlight and Brittany and I stood there to see what she would do. After a couple of minutes we saw her little hand poke out from under the blanket and leave the bag of carrots outside. That was so funny!

Then, we went to Cold Stone for some ice cream. She had blue ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. And half of my smoothie!

After Cold Stone Alaura wanted to go look at the animals at Petco so that was our next stop.

She loves the little furry creatures.

She wasn't as excited about the birds, but she did like looking at the fish, especially the ones that look like Nemo.

One thing that I noticed was that she doesn't like to keep her shoes on. At first I thought it was that shoes like flip flops and clogs slip off, so I put on her sneakers. But she just kept taking them off. Another thing she liked to do was to show off her big girl panties.

After Petco it had gotten to be about 5:00 and the kid hadn't had a nap. I was afraid that at that point if she went to sleep we wouldn't be able to get her to go to sleep at bedtime so we went to Macaroni Grill for some dinner. What did she order? Macaroni and cheese, what else? She still had tons of energy and if you noticed that some of the pictures are a little blurry it's because she never stood still long enough to pose for a picture. I just had to snap away and hope for the best. :)

After dinner we went home and made cookies. Oh, not from scratch like I normally would. I was, uh, getting a little tired cuz I'm getting old. I had bought frozen cookie dough from someone at work who was selling for some kid's fundraiser and it's frozen into little balls and all you have to do is put them on the cookie sheet and bake them. She had 3 cookies (see, this is the spoiling part) and then she started to slow down. So I took that as a cue that it was time to get ready for bed which she did readily. This time she laid right down with her head on her pillow and didn't move. With a kiss goodnight I shut the door and she went right to sleep. Yes! Mission accomplished!

Today when she woke up and came downstairs for breakfast, she asked if we were going to church. How did she know it was Sunday? I hadn't said a thing, but she knew that today we would go to church. As many of you know, Lawrence has been called to be the 1st counselor in the singles branch and that meant that Alaura would be the only kid there. This wonderfully smart and talkative child would be the only kid in the whole branch. Luckily, another ward had just gotten out of Sacrament meeting so I asked if she could go to their nursery which of course, they said yes and Alaura had no qualms about going right in to play with the toys and have a snack. But, come time for Sunday School the other ward was done for the day so she came into the chapel with us for Sunday School. She did as well as could be expected and all went well until Lawrence suggested I take her to go potty since she has recently been potty trained and was wearing regular panties. So I whispered to her that we were going to go potty and she started yelling, "I don't have to go potty! I don't have to go potty!" Of course you could hear her all over the chapel. I quickly sat down and took her word for it. We finished the rest of the meetings and since we're at the singles branch we got to have nachos and cookies and kool aid pouches afterward for what is known as "Linger Longer". She quickly drank two pouches of kool aid and a cookie just in time before Eric and Brooke showed up to take her over to her other grandparent's for Brooke's birthday celebration. I knew she had a good time when she told her mom and dad that she wanted to go back to Mimi's house. In fact, when Eric and Brooke called several times to see how she was doing (read: Brooke was having separation anxiety, naturally) she was "too busy" to talk!

We had a great time bonding with Alaura and I can't wait to do it again. This grandma thing is great!