Jason travels a lot for work. This leaves me taxed with the great responsibility of entertaining my children for days on end. You may remember the run in with the law I had during one of these "daddy gets to travel all over the world while mommy is stuck at home" time frames.
While many of the mom's out there are having scavenger hunts, and crafting junk with their kids, I basically chase mine around the house telling them to make sure they shove the cracker into their mouth in one entire piece because I am NOT going to sweep the living room again! *Side Note: I've learned that I'm one of the few americans who still uses the term "sweep" rather than "vacuum". I'm okay with that.
On a typical day where I've got to master the entertainment of my home, I'll first make sure that all of my sweepstakes entries are completed. This can involve my kids on many occasions, and therefore reduces the amount of time I must be creative. As you can see, I never win said sweepstakes because Evan has never ever used his "I'm a cute cuddly child" grin. He consistently goes for the "I can crush this candy box with my bare hands" look.
During this particular time frame where I had to scrape together some sort of activity to replace boredom, I decided to make chocolate chip cookies with the boys. Dawson didn't want to join in however and yelled down from the stairs "just let me know when they're done". And that's how I know I'm raising a fine young gentleman. Evan was especially fond of the idea though, and he even posed with the chocolate chips. There is absolutely nothing I can do about the coerced smile. Maybe henceforth I'll draw a smile over the top of his.
When it came time to roll out the dough, Evan thought he was the master of this domain. I'll allow you to see for yourselves if this is true. If you can make it to the end of the video, there's a special surprise.
Evan ended up with about 10 tiny cookies that didn't even have 1 chocolate chip in them. So I had him put them in a container and run them over to our neighbor that we don't really like. AHA! Just kidding. We are actually friends with all of our neighbors.
That little project only took us a half an hour. So I had to break out a game I created with the leftover pieces of a SpongeBob Cranium board game we have.
I grabbed all of the plastic cups from the cupboard and set them on the steps leading up to the kitchen.
Then I have Evan grab those flower looking plastic pieces and toss them, trying to land them into the cups. The thought of becoming a fair carny has crossed my mind several times.
Eventually Evan decided to line all of the cups up on the top row and have me toss the flower things while he kept score on a white board.
I think he failed to mark down the bazillion I landed in cups So I took the whiteboard and scribbled all over his x's.
Finally I went upstairs to check on Dawson because he was absent from the festivities.
It seems that owning an entire bedroom full of Lego sets can be it's own form of entertainment for some individuals.
This Lego fanaticism has turned into a whole thing now. Dawson stayed entertained his entire spring break by creating reviews of his Lego sets. Then he managed to talk me into creating a YouTube channel for him so that the Lego fan masses could enjoy his videos.
It's helpful to have Legos for babysitters.
Sometimes my creative genius has run out and I'm too tired to cook macaroni and cheese- because we all know that is not a new level of laziness- so I take the boys out for Chinese food.
I've stopped allowing the boys to open the fortune cookies because the last fortune in the cookie that Evan opened said:
"You have reasonable expectations and they will all be met".
I'd like all 3 of those fortune writers to come to my house and spend an entire day meeting Evan's expectations. And don't come crying to me when he's crying because the blue water bottle is in the dishwasher and the dishwasher is currently on or when he throws himself on the ground because he just ate the very last goldfish cracker and there aren't any more or when the star wars bowl already has something in it and he can't use it for his favorite kind of rice. By the way. Those all come in rapid succession. There's a whole day of that kind of expectation to be met. You are welcome to come between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.
In case that seemed a little dramatic, here's the most recent expectation I couldn't manage to meet:
"Mommy, what does E-L-M-M-L Spell? ...Mommy! That doesn't make sense! What does it spell?!!" I got out of that one by telling him he should play another round of Xbox.
The only redeeming opportunity of these single mom days are my trips to Starbucks...
Which of course, the espresso allows me the opportunity to be creative for at least another 1/2 hour.
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