This past Saturday my parents came over for some remodeling of their "villa" as my dad calls it. We have offered them a room to live in. They graciously accepetd and I am thrilled. We have given them the living area in the basement and my dad is reverting it into a little apartment. It was used as the children's playroom, er, junk room :). The toys in that room were overflowing and it was becoming quite rediculous. I will be slimming down there toy consumption because I have found if they abdundant toys, they really din't play with ALL of them. So we are going to be sort of limiting their toy consumption. I am not saying they cannot have toys, but once it gets over the top they really don't appreciate them as much. We will be allowing educational toys, play dough, legos, lincoln logs, outdoor supplies like soccer balls, footballs, etc. Stuff that we can all do together as a family rather than just saying, "Go play in your playroom". This approach will get us more involved as a family. Don't get me wrong, we are very close as a family now, but this will bond us even closer. If we look at it this way, at christmas time if the children each get 7 toys each and we currently have 7 children that is a grand total of 49 toys. That probably would not include toys from relatives and this is not counting the multitude of toys they currently have. Now if we had 2 childrent than maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal. I also see that we are not done growing our family and I am not sure when we will be. I forsee us have many, many children. So we need to put a slight limit on all of the toys that get accumulated by our children. I am o.k. with this because I would rather spend time with my children instead of them going off into another room all of the time. So this what we did this past week and weekend.
Here are some pictures of some of the children playing outside on a rather unusual and very pleasant spring day:
This is Arianna playing in the yard. I think she is looking at a map.
This is Owen cruisin' on his and Corey's new power wheels 4-wheeler, with Emma trying to catch him.
Emma looking out of their playhouse.
Here is Arianna looking out of the doll house
This picture is hard to see, but he has just lost his second top front tooth. Now he is missing his two front theeth. He was a little scared about it though.
