Paintball War Wounds

Marty & Peter took Brant & Tyler paintballin' several weeks ago. Marty and Brant had a great time!! You could see it on their clothes, skin and in their hair, lol! Their hair and clothes were splashed with beautiful splashes of paint...while their skin was spotted with bruises!! Nothing like a gun, a zillion paintballs & an outdoor obstacle coarse to bond father & son!!!

Preschoolers, Shoes & Water

I'll start this post by repeating what I put on Facebook as my status this morning:

Looking out ur back window seeing a zillion pairs of shoes floating in ur pool is never a good thing.......

One friend commented wondering how long it took the kids to figure that fun, new game out, while another friend already has it in the works to pull this as a prank on someone!!!

I'm totally laughing about this now, but, as Jenn can attest:) I was not very happy when I looked out and saw probably 20 shoes floating in the pool, with their matches laid out on the cool deck (they were thrown over the pool fence, but didn't quite make it to the shores). I sent the children in, using my stern mommy voice:) and put them in time out. I had already given them a warning about throwing rocks in the pool. They did stop that. I think it must have been 10-15 mins before they saw the basket of shoes on the back porch and figured their new game was with shoes, not rocks, so it surely must be ok.

After ridding the pool of all our shoes, I knew that action had to be taken, lol! I had warned them that if they did it again (which was the second warning) that they would have to sit in time out. SSOOO I sat them in time out by their age...Brock, 2 mins...he gladly sat in TO-smiling the whole time while repeating "Shoes, Pool!! I FROW dim in the pool! Dats FUNNY!". Sarah got 3 mins and Garrett 4. Marissa got sent to her room for eternity!
This was taken just a little while ago, after the steam stopped coming out of my head :) I left them all out on the cool deck to dry off, so when Marissa and I went out to clean up from their little game, I got to really laughing about it all and decided to take photos for the 'ol blog. Marissa probably wouldn't have been smiling like this if I had stopped to take a picture right in the heat of the moment, it probably would have been more of a look of fear ...or terror.
It's funny how a little time passes and you start realizing other things that were going on during such an event as this. Earlier in the morning, the kids starting playing house. I remember hearing Garrett say, "WEll, Dad's are stronger than mom's and I'm the dad, so I can throw way farther than any of you..." ...he was saying that as he took his turn throwing a shoe in the water:) I just didn't realize what he was talking about until after the fact, lol!

It's the next day and I'm finally finishing this post. Marissa woke up so excited that her, new, "shiny shoes" were dry...and that I will let her wear them again! After fishing one of them out of the pool, I let her wear them just for the sake of the photo up above, but after the photo shoot, I took them and put them in Time Out. I told her that since she threw them in and didn't take care of them (esp bc I just bought them) that she couldn't wear them at all yesterday. She was horribly upset when she learned that that meant she couldn't sleep in them either!! The end.