It's A Party at the Buttons!

With my sister being super pregnant.....they weren't able to spend Christmas with us this year. So, since they didn't come to see us - we made the trek over the mountains to see them. Sarah decided to head home from Grandma and Grandpa's house and become a Sirrine for the weekend, so we were minus one child.


It was so wonderful to spend a fun weekend with them. Joe and Adrienne's family went over too and it basically became a cousin-fest with kids running around everywhere with the oldest being Josh. And poor Keri - that was a lot of people to squeeze into her apartment. Dave's family has a tradition of going shooting with all the boys (insert Tim "the tool man" Allen here, hoo..hoo..hoo) and Jeff got a shotgun for Christmas last year , so he and Joe joined up with the Button men and went clay pigeon shooting most of the day.



This left Keri, Adrienne, and I with 8 kids to occupy with weather that was way to cold to play outside. We headed to Kids Castle for the day. Kids Castle is an indoor playland similiar to a McDonalds playland - just much bigger. You can either pay by the hour or for a whole day - we had brought along a packed lunch and got settled in for a whole day. There is this side, and another area that during the week offers gymnasticds lessons. Both areas were open and the kids had so much fun playing.

This video was taken on the gymnastic side where there was this huge pit of sponges to jump into. The kids probably spent 2+ hrs just in there. The cousins are wanting to all go in backwards together at once. It is, from the left, Kelsi, Madi, Andrew, Josh, and Ben. Gavin runs off in the beginning to just go to the other side and and jump in on his own. The kids were not actually all that coordinated in this attempt and Andrew ended up landing on Ben.

This is pretty much how Zach spent the day - all bundled up and not old enough to enjoy all the play things his brothers and cousins were playing on. A big thanks to Aunt Adrienne for the super cute new blanket for him for Christmas. We love it!

Just as we were finishing up at Kids Castle, the menfolk were done shooting things (Jeff will blog on this separately) and we met up with them to stop at Toys R Us (There was a sale on Nintendo DS games, and Josh had a gift card burning a hole in his pocket for a whole 24 hrs from Opa) and we then we headed to Sonic for dinner. It was very yummy and can't wait for Sonic to head over the mountains. Rumor has it they are coming to Puyallup.
This is the 3 mini-vans all lined up waiting for our food. Look how dirty ours is just from crossing the mountains. YUCK!

We had very recently gotten this new toy for Zach that he loves - and he was able to play under it with little Annika. They are going to have so much fun together before too long.

But with as much fun as the kids all had, I would have to say the most fun part was once all the kids were in bed, and it was grown up time. It was so fun to just sit and laugh and laugh with Joe, Adrienne, Keri and Dave (Jeff was exhausted and headed to bed early) I can only hope as my kids are constantly arguing and fighting that they grow out of it before too long and turn out to have as much fun together as I do with my brother and sister and their spouses. I think we finally went to bed about 2:30am, and we were all seriously punch drunk by then.

We were kind of hoping that Keri's new baby Kayli wanted to make her appearance while we were all there, but it didn't happen, which means we have at least 2 more trips to Yakima coming up in the very near future.