Monday, May 26, 2014

Grandparents at Last!

It's what grandparents do, right?  Spoil the grandkids and then let their parents deal with the consequences. 
Because of the distance between us, we've never really had that fun, but today we did.  After a morning with the girls at Tom's house, Lacie went down for a nap and Walt, Tom and I were going to go to get yogurt with Brianna, to give Laurel quiet to work in.

But Tom needed to go to the store, so he sent the two of us on with Bri (she is now big enough to fit in a booster car seat, instead of the baby kind of car seat) and we went off to Yogurtland. (Six year old Bri was invaluable, since she knew exactly how to get to Yogurtland, knew "left" from "right" and spotted the pet shop next door to the yogurt place before we did!)

Not used to the size of the cups and how much they hold, I probably bought more yogurt than Bri usually has.  She was good about choosing only fruit toppings and told me that "usually I can only have one sweet thing," meaning only one of the candy-like toppings.  She chose 2 gummy bears for her "sweet" and then sat with us to eat her bowl of yogurt.


But the sugar in the yogurt and in the fruit, and the excitement of being out on an adventure began to hit her and by the time Daddy finally got there, she was bouncing off the walls.  Literally.

When we were ready to leave, Walt was prepared to return to Tom's house but I, knowing Lacie would probably still be asleep and Bri was needing some calm time, suggested we go home instead and send Bri back with Tom, which we did, leaving Tom to convince Bri that she should not remove her shoes and suck on them in the parking lot.

Tee hee...It is fun to be a grandparent!

But the morning had been great fun.  We got there before the girls woke up, so we were there to wake them up -- and to see the new bunk beds recently installed, so they now sleep in the same room.


Laurel had work to do, so we kept the girls busy out on the patio, Tom pitching to Bri (for what seemed like an hour!...the girl had stamina!) while Walt acted as catcher.


At the same time I read book after book to Lacie, who absolutely thrilled me when one of the books she chose to read was "Joe the Bear and Sam the Mouse," which was one of the books I bought a few months back because it had been one of our kids' favorites.  It was fun to do the low "Joe the bear" and high pitched "Sam the Mouse" voices again.  Like riding a bicycle...even the inflections I used to use were right there again. 

Laurel had done an iMovie of Bri's t-ball team that was amazing.  She tried to copy it to a disk for me, but the file was too big, so she shared it in Google Docs and I was able to call it up on my cell phone.  Bri and I watched it together (for the third time) on my phone.


Santa Barbara at this time of year is just beautiful.  The city is ablaze with jacaranda trees, their purple flowers shimmering in the sunlight.


(This particular tree is in Tom's neighbor's back yard behind a lemon tree, adding yellow and green to the purple pallet.)

Tom and family had a dinner date tonight, so Walt and I took Joe out to Outback Steakhouse for a delicious dinner, but we have all had an elegant sufficiency and I just may be asleep before 10 p.m. again tonight!

Bed Head

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