I'm sure this is a huge surprise, but evidently watching children isn't conducive to prompt blogging :).

Day 2 was pretty easy, for me at least. Elijah woke us up at about 8:30, and Isaiah got up soon after, and we took them downstairs for breakfast (as mentioned in the last post). I headed off to work, and didn't hear from Sarah again until nap time. She and the boys had a busy morning of gardening, visiting the Smith-Gilbert Arboretum (the plants weren't that popular, but the waterfall and huge koi were), and then heading to our house for lunch and to check on the cats. After nap time I think they played in the sandbox most of the afternoon, and then bath time and dinner. When I got back from work they were already in pajamas and fed, so we watched some episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine (thanks YouTube!) and went to bed.

Day 3 (Saturday) was the first time that I spent all day with the boys. After getting up at 8:30 again (I expected worse), we started out with a bang -- Touch-A-Truck! We met The Craigs there and enjoyed a morning of enormous, loud, crowded trucks. The first thing that any child wants to do when in the cab of a giant truck is blow the horn, something that Elijah (scared of loud noises) didn't appreciate. Also, they weren't wild about standing in line for the trucks. But we had a good time anyway :).

After Touch-A-Truck it was off to the Heilman house for lunch and picking up my stuff for church in the morning. Back to the Remington's, and nap time -- this time we didn't make the mistake of trying to get stuff done, everyone got a good 2 hour nap, including Sarah and me.

After nap, we played inside and out at the sandbox until it was time for dinner. The Craigs graciously invited us over for dinner, and we had awesome lasagna. Amanda was fine with all of the boys running amok together, and Sarah and I were able to catch our breath :). We abandoned the Craigs at about 7, which gave us enough time to head back to the house and have baths before bed. Evanda and Shelley returned home later that night, and we went home to spend the night in our own bed :).

All in all, we had a great time! Elijah and Isaiah were awesome, and although we had some rough patches, they were pretty well behaved. I learned a lot about parenting, or at least about me and parenting. It requires constant attention, which is somewhat draining, and even I found my patience tested a time or two. It was interesting to see how Sarah and I had different strengths. I was good at playing, disciplining, and keeping Isaiah from crying during his diaper changes. Sarah was good at making sure everyone was clean/fed/dressed/taken care of, coming up with things to do and stories to tell, and handling multiple boys at once. I know that there's a reason God put us together, but it's always nice to see aspects of it revealed and see how we can work together as a team.

So the end result: we had fun, love the boys, and still want to have kids :P.

Some pictures from the weekend are here in my photo set, and there are some of Chris's on his flickr site.

Photo by Christopher Craig

So we volunteered to watch the Remington boys, Elijah and Isaiah, for a long weekend while Evanda and Shelley take a little vacation. One night and morning down! Today should be easy (for me) since I get to go to work -- hopefully Sarah will survive :).

Actually the boys have been great so far. Elijah wanted to play trains on the floor, and Isaiah was just about ready for bed by the time Evanda and Shelley left. This morning was interesting, I think we're going to learn a lot about ourselves and how we work together as "parents". I'll probably talk about that more after we've had a couple days with the boys.

Isaiah had a truly impressive diaper when he work up this morning, but he freaked out whenever Sarah tried to get him up on the changing table. He only stopped crying when I came over, so I got him up and laid my hand on his chest comfortingly while she changed him... he held onto my hand so hard the whole time. I don't know what it was about me, since he likes Sarah fine and played with her after he was clean. But wow, there was a lot of stuff in that diaper! My plan is to make her take care of all poo-related activities for now, but I know I'll have to deal with it when it's my own kid :).

Not a great picture, but here are Sarah and the boys at breakfast before I left for work.