Babysitting little Q's

Screams met us as Terrie opened the door and let us inside the house. Tucker and Coral bounced around the living, jumping and dancing with joy at an afternoon and evening with Auntie Ali and Auntie Bryn. First we were introduced to the newest member of their family, Maggie, a brown German Shepherd, some-kind-of-terrier cross who Mark said was probably the friendliest dog on the planet. I quietly made a correction in my mind; that dog was Pepper. In any case Maggie proved to be constantly under foot, literally. We'd try to take a step and there was Maggie, flopped on the grass for a tummy rub or licking the feet of the closest person to her.

For awhile we played outside on Tucker and Coral's new Big Toy (what we call the playground set in their backyard) and then Bryn started a soccer game with Tuck. A bit later I joined in and even Coral played for a few minutes before dragging me off to help her finish making her "bird house" (sticks and twigs she had stuck onto the branches of a small tree near the house). Then she found "tiny rocks" (bits of the shingles from the roof) beneath the drain pipe. She sprinkled handfuls of them below the tree and then wanted to have a place to put the extras so I built her several "rock pits," small holes dug into the ground at the base of the bird-house tree. We spent a long time transferring rocks until finally Maggie came over to investigate and broke Coral's spell with the rocks.

Coral loves Maggie. Before Mark and Terrie left on their date Terrie told us that she occasionally crawls into the Dog-loo to be with Maggie. Coral and I took turns "tackling" Maggie and rubbing her belly after she obligingly dropped to the ground. Finally we let the dog be and headed inside where the soccer players had gone several minutes earlier. Inside I got my dominoes out and I built domino lines for Coral to knock over. Tucker, who had been reading his comic books (ones he himself had written) to Auntie Bryn, came over to investigate after the first knock-down and tried his hand at the line-building too for a bit.

Later on Coral and I played Hide-the-Dominoes with three dominoes from the set. According to Coral I wasn't allowed to have any clues or hints when it was my turn to find the dominoes, but I was supposed to give her lots of hots and colds when she was looking. Tuck joined in for a round and then I put the dominoes away so we could play Scrabble Slam. Tucker got the game really quick and had fun playing it while Coral tried to mess it up for us since she didn't want to play, but didn't want us to either. I worked through that controversy and then we put the game away and Bryn warmed up the pizzas for supper.

We played more games after supper until it was time for the kids to put on pj's and have Quiet Time. We read a bunch of books in half an hour and then put the kids to sleep. After the customary "I have to go to the bathroom once more" delays, they were finally in bed and then out came the laptops and textbooks as we half studied and half watched the Olympics on TV until Mark and Terrie got home.

Even though I'm super tired now, I have to run to Walmart to buy ingredients for my demonstration speech tomorrow. I was going to try and do something cool (how to write news stories), but the demonstration part of that idea proved to be too time consuming so I'm just going to fall back on the traditional how-to-make-a-certain-type-of-food speech. I'm going to make up a batch of Midnight Bars tonight so that I can bring in the final product and let my classmates taste them and then I'll measure out another set of ingredients into containers so I can whip up another batch during my speech tomorrow. It might be a long night but I wouldn't had traded the good memories I made with my niece and nephew today for anything.