Babysitting

I ended up doing a bit of babysitting this last weekend. On Friday, we had our neighbor, Gem, for the afternoon. The girls were really good and played so nicely together. Gem really wanted to watch "Rose", but when I went to open it, it was missing. (Very upsetting.) So we watched a different "Rose" movie. The girls were so cute all lined up on the sofa. This is babysitting at it's easiest!
On Saturday we had our friend, Brie, for the day. The girls had a blast with all the new dress-up clothes from Christmas. Even Rachel got in on the action. She thinks she's such a big girl!
After some dress-up, I took the girls to the Channel Islands Harbor (down the street) to see the "tall ship" the Hawaiin Chieftain. It's an old fashioned boat that tours up and down the coast. You can actually sail on her with your whole family, but they also offer dockside tours for free, so we took advantage.
The girls wanted to go downstairs first. We went back to the captain's quarters and learned some interesting things about bailing pins and tea bricks.
Then we went above deck and to the back of the boat.
And then to the front of the boat.
And then we were about done. I think the girls went downstairs one more time. It was kind of fun to talk to the crew of the boat too. They were all in costume and some were working on the boat, but they shared some fun stories with us.

But we weren't done there. I still had to wear these kids out and 20 minutes on a boat was not going to cut it. So we headed off for a park near the harbor. It has this great see-saw that all the girls enjoyed. I think Lizzie stayed on it almost the entire time we were there. Rachel also had some fun chasing a dog.

Finally, when they were tired of the park, we went to McDonald's to spend our Christmas gift certificates from GG Snowball. Again, more fun was had as they scarfed down chicken nuggets and then ran up the stairs and went down the slide at the playplace. That took up enough of the day and their energy so that I, I mean, we could make it through the rest of the day.