We Had Visitors!

My niece JoBeth and her boys came for a visit!  We were part of their whirlwind tour of Ohio and thanks to all of them for making my house a stop on their tour!

They came in Friday night.  One thing about Jo, she not only brought dinner with her, she COOKED it too!  For real, you guys are welcome ANY time!!

After a yummy dinner, we sat down for some family game time.  One great game for the whole family is Pokeno.  We grew up playing this game and it's always a great time playing with the young and the old.  Pokeno is like playing bingo, but instead of numbers on your Pokeno card,  there are pictures of playing cards on your Pokeno card. 

Thanks to my brother Phil for providing these first two pictures.  As you can see, we are all having a great time!  For as hard as Isaiah and Ron were concentrating on their games, I think JoBeth and Noah walked away the big winners!

I set up the air mattress on the living room floor for the boys.  While they were upstairs taking a bath, Benny came up to check out the new living room arrangements.  I think they met with his approval.

After breakfast, we had some coloring and art time.  This is my favorite time.  They boys have supplied me previously in refrigerator art but I haven't had any in awhile.  It's not good to have a naked fridge!  The four of us has a serious art session at my dining room table and now I have a complete refrigerator!

Now, I join in during art time.  However, since I am not an artist, I usually stick to the coloring books.  I'm jiggy with coloring between the lines!  So, I colored me a picture of one Sesame Street character, then when I turned the page, I saw an activity in the book.  The activity was to draw a picture of my favorite bird.  Now THAT sounded easy!  I can DO this!

What kind of bird I was going to draw really didn't matter.  I was going to draw a bird and if it LOOKED like a bird, I'd consider it a success.

Here is my bird:

 

Now, I'm going to explain a couple of things about this picture.  First of all, I was VERY proud of that picture!  For real, that LOOKS like a bird, right??  Since my audience is a 6 and an 8 year old, I added poop there to the back end of the bird.  Here is the same pictures now with labels for those of us that aren't art critics.

When I told the boys that was POOP, I expected a few laughs.  But no, I was told that I had to draw GROUND underneath the poop or else the poop would just be floating in the air.  Hence, I had to draw the ground beneath the bird.  I hate it when an 8 year old is WAY smarter than I am but he was totally correct.

I added the ground and handed the picture back over for assessment.  In a straight face and I'm sure meant as a compliment, I was told that for a bird with a round head, it was a pretty good picture.   That is sooo a compliment!  He could at LEAST tell it was a bird!!!  BONUS for me! 

After art time, we went out bumming.  We hit a few of the awesome spots in our neighborhood!  We started off at the local library where we read books and played checkers on the table sized checker board.  That is NOT one of my best games so I begged off of challenging the boys.  I'm sticking to Pokeno!

We wanted to go play at a park after the library so we headed to Lakeview Park.  Holy crap was it COLD outside yesterday!  While it was too cold to play there, we did walk down to the water and take a quick look around.

Then we came inland a bit and went to play at Central Park.  Central Park has the BEST sliding board I've ever seen!  Instead of a single piece of metal to slide down, this sliding board has a series of rollers that sent you down hill.  No more getting stuck on a hot sliding board half way down!  Ok, this one isn't so easy to walk back up but I guess that was half the fun.  The boys seemed to like it since they went down this slide a gazillion times.  Noah was a little more by the book in his sliding experience.

Isaiah went down that slide just about every way imaginable!

In spite of the cold and wet weather, we had a great time!  Or at least I had a great time!

Thanks to JoBeth and her boys for coming to visit!  I did have a great time and I appreciate that you added me to your visit list.  Also, thanks for the cooking tips!!  :)  You guys are welcome back any time!