Yesterday morning started with a 7am call to Poison Control! Aiden had pushed a chair over to the kitchen cabinets, climbed up, managed to get the not-so-child-proof lid off of the gummy vitamins and was chomping them down when I found him. I had been upstairs getting Logan up and changed while this was happening. I'm pretty sure he had no more than 10 of them (plus or minus the 3 that I fished out of his mouth). We had a lock on that cabinet, but it had been moved since I thought Aiden was over that annoying stage of trying to get his own food. Interesting fact: you do not need to worry about your kid consuming gummy vitamins until he/she eats around 100 of them! They contain no iron and the next thing they worry about is too much Vitamin A. I was told just to skip the vitamin for a few days and go on with my life. The lady on the phone literally said "it's fine...kids do this all day long". Alrighty then!

So...Sunday we hosted the neighborhood Superbowl Party. It was a casual affair - come, bring food & drinks, let the kids run wild. I had been trying for a while to get the massive amount of GeoTrax that we have set up in a cool configuration in the basement and thought that the party was a good excuse. They used to live in the playroom, but we never got them out because it would take FOREVER to make a nice set up and the boys would only play with it for a while and then tear it down. Too frustrating! During Christmas break, Brian and I moved all the stuff downstairs and I spent Sunday morning putting together a little masterpiece. Brian helped me with the 2 pieces I have never understood, but other than that, I managed to do it all by myself! Logan (and mostly Aiden) acted as assistants....they would bring me the pieces I needed.

Here is the final product! I tried to use different colored tracks for the different areas: green for the "country side", gray for "the city" and brown for the "industrial area". I think this should count as class credit should I ever decided to go for an engineering degree!! I even made sure that the trains wouldn't get stuck in any weird loops....as long as they all go counter-clock-wise, we're good!!

Here are all the trains and construction vehicles ready to go.

Just a shot of the basement. I cleaned it up and it's fairly well organized right now so I wanted to take a picture. Way in the background is the 10X10 inflatable "bounce house" we gave the boys for Christmas 2 years ago. We decided not to finish our basement yet since little boys need a place to ride bikes, run and throw stuff during the winter!

This is the playroom after 12 kids "played in it". Every drawer, bin and container has been turned over and dumped. According to most of the kids and the parents, 2 individuals did most of the damage: Aiden and one other little guy who actually doesn't belong to me!

More shots of the playroom.
That shelf is supposed to have 7 containers on it!! Where did they all go? :) Another fun activity the kids discovered: take the plastic cups off of the beverage table and stomp all over them. The foyer was covered in crushed red cups. Another mom tried to stop the mayhem, but it wasn't hurting anyone (and we have a gazillion cups from Costco that we've had for 3 YEARS) so I told her to let it go for a while. We finally put a movie on for them...which they sat still and watched for about 10 minutes before they went back to running around and yelling (it was nearly impossible to hear the TV!) Reminder: 12 kids between the ages of 1 and 6!
A shot of the living room where the adults were trying to watch the game.
This is a horrible picture, but we brought our bedroom TV down to the "formal" living room, ran a cord over the stairs from the main tv and had 2 of them going. I tried turning that into a movie-viewing area for the kids, but as I mentioned before, that whole idea didn't last for long!