A Grandmothering Type Of Day

I got to spend the day with Liam, Zander, Carter, and Alex as Jessica and Elessia finished some of their Christmas plans.

With my trusty assistant, the popular Aunt Jena, we took four little kids to the Living Planet Aquarium.  These kids are related to me because they loved the fish and all of the different animals we saw.

Finding the snake in his hiding spot!

That is one big creature swimming by--

A quick moment of climbing on a tree frog statue and then off to the favorite....

PENGUIN EXHIBIT!

Now the girls were no longer content with looking from the stroller so they all lined up at the glass to watch the penguins dive, swim, splash, and do all of the fun things that penguins are known for.  Alex especially loved the penguins.  Carter would look for me to be held  if they swam too close to where she was standing, but Alex was ready to jump with them if that had been possible.

Everyone liked the turtles, too, although they were much slower than the penguins.

Then we went to the inside playground at the Aquarium.  It seemed like a good idea to let the boys run around with the masses of other kids while we sat and watched them.  The only flaw in the plan was Alex and Carter were immediately ready to be out of the stroller.  They had enough experience with parks to know that there was fun to be had and off they went.

They loved it when Liam stopped by to join in playing with them.  He got them laughing so hard by sliding into them at the bottom of the toddler slide.

Carter grabbing some cuddles from Aunt Jena (while I was chasing Alex who wanted to try the big kids' slide.)  Keeping up with two toddlers going in different directions while trying to track two preschoolers in a sea of children is not an easy feat.  Let's just be glad that I left with the same four children, all in one piece, and ignore the few minutes of panic when I couldn't find Zander playing on the play structure.  (He was there just moving around so fast that I didn't see him when I made my first search for him. Liam was good to check in with us every few minutes, but Zander was just into having fun.)

We finished our walk through the aquarium by checking out the whale display for kids.  And then despite some snow falling, I was able to get four kids into their right car seats and on the way to our house for an afternoon of play.

Playtime---

Ben came and joined us and showed the girls how this little Christmas tree played music and lit up.  Then they just wanted him to do it over and over and over again.  When he got tired of it, they wanted to do it themselves but they were a little too little for that.  They loved it while the "party" lasted.

Dedicated readers might remember that Jena is pretty good at yoyos.  She can do some tricks and for a while had quite a collection of different types of yoyos.  Well, of all the grandkids, Liam loves the yoyos and likes to watch Jena yoyo and then tries it himself--without any luck yet.  Today he tried a new plan by moving the chair over and climbing up and trying to yoyo from a height--I guess he figured that was Jena's trick--she was taller than him.  It didn't work, but I loved watching the thought process and problem solving he used.

We did dinner and bathtime and then loaded them back into the car for the trip back home that night.

It was a fun day--one I wish that I could have repeated with each set of my grandchildren so their parents could have time for Christmas prep--or a good nap.

Christmas is truly getting closer!