Family Ties

Last weekend was the church auction, and since Buds and I had worked with Wendy on the catalog, our work had been done weeks prior. (Wendy did the extra clean up work that was needed after the original catalog came out.)

We went to the auction, and had a grand time.

But, that’s not the point of this post.

The children had been farmed out for the night to various places. Monkey headed to Thalia’s for another sleepover. We had no concerns there because she’s done that before, and had a great time.

The Littles had both decided they wanted to try a sleepover at Aunt A and Uncle Z’s with cousins. It was the first attempt for The Buster, and the second for Yessa, and I was very interested to see how it went.

Buds and I enjoyed ourselves at the auction, and got to trot off after it was over, at 9:00 p.m. As we drove home, Buds’ phone rang with a call from Uncle Z. Both our littles were unable to fall asleep. The Buster wanted to talk to me on the phone, and it was the classic parents’ dilemma. I wanted the children to feel comfortable telling me what they wanted to do, and I knew they had been excited about staying overnight, so I didn’t want them to feel badly if they decided to come home. Hence, Buster and I danced around on the phone for a bit until I finally said, “Would you like us to come get you?”

“Please come get us.”

The timing was perfect. We were nearly to our house, so we just took a swift detour (I love that cousins live so close!), scooped up the children and their stuff, zoomed home, dumped them both into bed where they immediately fell asleep, then zonked out for the night.

Cousins came over to play at our house the next afternoon since everyone felt badly about them waking up to find Buster and Yessa were gone. Buster had worried about that when he left Aunt A’s house, telling her, “Please explain to O because when he wakes up he won’t understand why I’m gone.” He was correct, O was distraught when he awakened at 5:30 a.m. to find Buster not asleep in his room.

All in all, it was a great experience for everyone. Monkey took about 5 attempts to work up to her first sleepover at Grandma and Grandpa Iowa’s house many years ago. And she only had her first sleepover in Virginia recently. Plenty of time for those future sleepovers, and I’m so thankful that Aunt A and Uncle Z were willing to give it a shot.