Poorly Behaved Tornados, “The Never-Ending Derby”, and Please Hide the Scissors

I’m sitting in the always welcoming Kansas City airport right now so I thought I’d share a bit about my whirlwind trip from Seattle to St Louis this weekend.  For those of you who haven’t been following along at home, I’m living in Seattle, while the family has been in KC trying to sell the house.  This has taken WAY longer than we anticipated, kinda like when you’re in a meeting and have to go to the bathroom . . . bad.  Finally I couldn’t deal with it anymore and the family is moving out west on March 1st.  Anyway, these weekend I schemed (a word I’d like to use WAY more than I do) to surprise the kiddos while they were in St Louis visiting their cousins there for the last time.  Here are the highlights several things that happened this weekend as 3 adults and 9, mostly really small, children had a ball:

• Traci (otherwise knows as the Mrs HTF) and Krista (her twin sister) ventured to the airport late at night to pick me up.  Krista must’ve been feeling quite powerful in her Dodge mini-van because she cruised in the lane restricted to huge buses.  I rushed over to hurry and get in before we were run over without being noticed.
• The kids were genuinely surprised to see me – Braeden had to do a really-sleepy-double-take and Allison looked pretty scared when I burst out from under the covers…happily that was followed with a happy hug.
• Somehow the kids, in some kind of coordinated attack, all forgot that I was still on West-coast time that first morning and decided it would be a good idea to wake up early, turn on the video games loudly, and scream at the TV.  There are worse ways to be woken up, but I’m having a hard time thinking of any right now.
• We took the kids to the YMCA so the mommies could do a 45 minute “spinning class” that somehow lasted over 2 hours as the mommies realized that the kids were taken care of, and most importantly, nowhere near them.
• We got to go to my nephew’s Pinewood Derby, which began 30 minutes after it was supposed to, and still hasn’t ended.  Somehow my daughter squeezed 2 naps in while sitting on my lap.  There were 17 boys, and they each had to race each other, at least twice . . . you do the math.  But Ryan did awesome and his car won the “Sportiest Design” much like our dented mini-van.  This photo, somehow, was the “scoring system:”
• When we got back from the derby we found these priceless images.  Yep, the three-year-olds had combined their significant intellectual prowess and decided my Allison’s pig-tails were way too long and would look better if they were each clearly different lengths.  FYI – prior to this the pig-tails reached her shoulders.  In the second picture you see chunks (technical term) of hair along with Hershey-Kiss wrappers – a natural combination.  This, of course, is not the first time this has happened with our girls.  I should just cut the girl’s hair like mine . . .

 

• Remember how Mary Poppins could sing a song and the room would clean itself up – well, our 9 kids have the exact opposite impact on a room when they enter.  After less than 10 second it appears like a poorly-behaved-and-angry-tornado was there. 

There is, of course, a lot more I could add, but those were some of the bigger memories.  We’ll miss being so close to the cousins.  Despite the chaos, there’s no where else I’d have rather been this weekend, but then again, I’m already bald, so I didn’t have much to lose.