Starting a Little Early...

Caleb was the first of the grandchildren to stay overnight.  Well...he is 10 now and pretty low maintenance, so that makes it easy for ME!  And he was willing to sleep on the floor in the TV room, which I suspect the other children would have to sleep on the floor in my room!  Not that I don't have room on the floor in my room, but I do have Riley our dog sleeping at the foot of our bed, and it may not be good to have a lot of others near him while sleeping.  Caleb was especially looking forward to Jalen knocking on my door in the morning and seeing him.  They did finally connect, but Caleb had to go over to his house to see him and then he brought him back to my house.  So here they are, sitting on the couch and Jalen wants to play with Caleb's DS, they fight for a minute, then I tell Caleb to give Jalen his other one.  That makes Jalen very happy...now he is just like his BIG cousin.  Does he know how to play it?  I don't think so, but he is happy and he is quiet, so I am happy, too!

Lily joined the group after a few minutes, but she went right into the craft room and started making snowflakes.  Then Caleb joined her and finally Jalen, who had to color with markers!  (YES, I have the washable markers for the little ones so I can easily wipe off anything that gets off the paper).  I have a little secret stash for when the kids come over so we can "create" things together.  Sometimes what I cut out and plan for them is NOT quite what they want to use.  For example, I cut and stamped some Christmas Thank You's for them and got out the snowflake stamp and made sample card.  I thought it looked quite lovely.  They liked it, sure, but they had a different idea about how to put it all together.  Now this is where I have to rein myself in and let their creativity juices flow...grrrr....why can't they just do it the way I had planned???  Dina gave me a thought however...she said sometimes she tells them it just has to be done this way THIS time!  But they wrote the thank you cards and they turned out great!