Pickles, Dinos and Bob

This is the story of how a jar of pickles, dinosaurs and a little guy named Bob saved my Friday night. My sister rarely goes out. She asks for a sitter so rarely, that I try to go out of my way to watch the kids when she asks. Last night was one of those rare occasions. She apologized in advance because she thought it would be a late night so I promised to give the kids latte's and feed them cotton candy so they would still be wide awake when she got home!

Dinner was the first order of business and I figured they would want some kind of fast food, so that would be easy - right? Wrong! Apparently, Aunt Bonkeygirl is a gourmet chef and the little ones clamored loudly and clearly for the one thing they had to have - chicken dinosaurs and mac & cheese. Ugh, not again! In a fit of desperation we fixed this one time as a quick and easy meal and now it is the only thing they want to eat when they come over. I really shouldn't complain because it only takes 15 minutes to prepare, but I'm not a fan of the dinosaur chicken. If you are not familiar with the preschool set, you may not have any clue what Chicken Dinosaurs are. Simply, they are chicken nuggets shaped like T-Rex and a Stegasaurus. Half eaten dinos drenched in ketchup do put a new spin on Jurassic Park!

After dinner, they wanted to go back in the pool (as they put it "it's a beautiful day for swimming!") but I wasn't quite ready to swim again. I used the old "you have to wait 30 minutes after eating to swim" story and they bought it. While we were waiting, they spied lightning bugs and started chasing them across the yard. What's more fun than having your very own lightning bugs, so Aunt Bonkeygirl found an old pickle jar that would be a good home for some lightning bug flying too slow or too low to get caught. Fortunately for the lightning bugs, we could never catch any, but we have the jar for the next time.

Those two love the pool and I was finally able to convince them around 10 pm that it was time to put our PJ's on. We all changed into our PJ's and climbed into Aunt B's "ginormous" bed to watch Kung Fu Panda. But we couldn't watch the movie alone, we had to have all of the special Lego's with us. But we had to be very careful not to smash them. I think every little Lego person was on the Pirate raft - Spongebob, Patrick, the mechanic guy, and my two favorite pirates, Twinkie and Bob. That many squirming bodies and leaving enough room for Bob not to get squished didn't leave much room for me, but we managed to keep everyone fairly content until Mommy came to pick them up.

I'm quite sure they were asleep before they got home and will have some fantastic story to tell Mommy in the morning about dinosaurs, the green/purple/blue pool, where lightning bugs sleep during the day, and Bob.