Surviving Sunday

While preparing for our trip to Omaha, I was trying to envision all the difficulties I would face, so that I could prepare for them well in advance. We had planned and prepared for our airplane ride. Check. The next big hurdle? Church. With seven kids. At 9:00 in the morning. Which was basically 8:00 church for us because we were still on Utah time.

How did it go? These cute faces say it all:

Church. Was. Awesome! Well. Besides being 10 minutes late due to a few children who shall remain nameless who tried to fake sick and refused to get their clothes on. But once we were at church, the kids were angels! We did not even have to go out in the hall once for Sacrament Meeting. Oh! I was amazed.

We came home and had naps and dinner, and then we popped popcorn for a movie!

Here's the sitch. Maybe the kids were so good at church because we might have bribed them with a somewhat illegal reward contingent upon their good behavior. Jeff had asked the kids if they had seen Frozen on Saturday. That's all he said. "Hey kids. Have you seen Frozen?" And the kids misunderstood this questions. They interpreted it as, "Hey kids! Do you want to go see Frozen this week in the movie theaters?!?"

So the majority of Saturday we had a kid questioning us every hour to schedule in a Frozen movie theater date. Which we knew was never going to happen. So we told them that, but they had their hearts set on Frozen.

Well by some miracle, I happened to see on Facebook Sunday morning before church about 500 of my friends post that there was a sketchy website where you could watch Frozen online for free! So when one of the first two kids started faking sick on Sunday morning, I may have blurted out, "We can watch Frozen after church if you hurry and get ready."

And that's how we ended up illegally watching Frozen from the comfort of Jacob and Laurie's home on Sunday night. And here's me hoping the police don't come knocking on my door because I have now confessed my sins to the world wide web.

On Sunday night, well after we put Eli to bed, I looked over to the door that goes down to the basement (where my kids were sleeping), and saw this in the crack under the door:

Totally freaked me out. But turns out it was Eli. With a little car that had headlights that lit up.

Monday we sent the kids off to school. The kids were so good at home. Eli and Logan ran off and played all day long. We hardly saw them.

After dinner, we had a fabulous Family Home Evening! Logan was eager to conduct the meeting.

Emma read a scripture.

And Natalie gave a lesson she had just prepared in Activity Days about The First Vision.

She was so cute to get the little boys involved.

Then we made chocolate covered strawberries for our treat/activity. The kids were so cute! Logan would pass the strawberries to Eli who handed them to Emma, Natalie or Luke who were our diligent dippers. They made a great team!

The strawberries were quite man-handled, but that didn't stop me from enjoying one or eight of them.

Emma reserved the biggest strawberry for Jeff. Jeff had won the kids' hearts by waiting over an hour to pick them up from school every day in an effort to be the first car in the pickup line.

The funnest part about watching seven kids, you ask? Dressing up an adorable little baby girl. Emma tried to tell me multiple times that her mom only puts bows on Claire for church, but I insisted on dolling her up all through the week because she was just too cute!

This is the look Claire gave me any time I looked at her for the first five days. It cracked me up every time.

But every once in a while I could get a smile out of her.

Carson loved taking care of Claire. Any time she would start crying, he would (as carefully as he could) try to put her binky in her mouth.

Logan and Eli. I made the mistake of telling them to smile, which got me a series of unnatural faces.

On Tuesday, Emma lost a tooth! That was a big surprise.

Logan and Eli in their own little car world. They were seriously adorable together.

The boys -- all of them -- LOVE the iPad. This was a common scene in the evenings while me and the girls ran off to make the music video.

Jeff was the favorite "fake parent" to everybody but one. Claire was all mine! It was fun to have a baby who actually liked to snuggle because my kids have never been very snuggly.

To be continued...