"Not Me!" Monday

Welcome to Not Me! Monday! This blog carnival was created by MckMama. You can head over to her blog to read what she and everyone else have not been doing this week.

Whew, I don't even know where to start. This week we did not decide to drive Anderson, Indiana to visit family. It is a 17 hour long car ride, and we are not insane enough to attempt that with 4 boys ages 1-7. For the kids surely would get bored and unruly along the way. How do you entertain an 18 month old on that long of a trek? We have way more sense than that. We certainly wouldn't have been kissing the ground when we stepped out of the van onto Indiana soil 2 days later. Nor would we have anxiously gotten out our heavy winter jackets excited to finally be able to use them and leaving the 90 degree weather behind. We wouldn't have marveled at God's handiwork of creating such amazing fall leave colors, since in Texas they only have 2 colors: green and dead.

We walked around Dustin's sister and brother-in-law's land with the kids picking pears and then rotten apples. The boys wouldn't have started throwing the fruit: first to the side, and then at each other. I mean someone could get hurt and we would never allow that. So when Bryson threw a rotten apple and it hit Brayden square in his forehead and it turned into applesauce and then when Bry apologized Brayden yelled "say it like you mean it", we all wouldn't have erupted into laughter. I mean that doesn't reinforce that they shouldn't be doing that when they get a laugh out of us.

We didn't bribe our children to take the perfect Christmas card picture by taking them to a park and then telling them they couldn't play until we had the picture. That would be mean, and would be teasing them to dangle that in front of them. So we certainly wouldn't have fallen over when in less than 4 minutes we had a picture with 4 boys all looking AND smiling in the same shot! You see we normally spend hours to get one we settle on that has 4 boys looking at the camera in the general direction of the camera and no one crying. I think we may have found a new picture taking technique.

We didn't take the boys to the Indianapolis Zoo only to take an hour long bathroom break for one of the boys on the way. It was only a 40 minute drive from where we were staying so certainly they could have gone before we left, and in a clean bathroom nonetheless. We wouldn't have stopped at a Family Christian Bookstore, figuring they would have a cleaner bathroom than a service station, and then proceed to pretend to look around as if we were shopping and not just making a pit stop. I mean come on who does that? So when we finally told him if he didn't finish we were going to miss the zoo, he wouldn't have jumped right up. If he was truly done he would have gotten up on his own, it can't be fun sitting on a public potty for an hour. The threat turned out to be much more of a reality when we got to the zoo at 2:40 and learned they closed at 4, and wanted $60 for our family. We would never spend that much money on such a short time. However, when they offered to give us 20% off and promised animals were actually out until 4:30 we decided to go ahead since the boys were beaming with excitement. We would never rush the kids around to try to see as much as they could, and then get excited to learn that it is a pretty small zoo and we could actually see most of the animals in that amount of time. While at the zoo, a bee did not land smack dab in the middle of the baby's face, who was riding in a backpack carrier on Dustin's back. Nor did Brennan just reach up and grab it with his hand, isn't he scared of them? I certainly wouldn't have taken off running at the baby to grab it from him, you see I DO NOT like bees so I would never purposely grab one, even if it was to take it out of the hand of my son. Amazingly, neither of us got stung but we were doing dances the rest of the afternoon to get away from them.

My brother-in-law did not make a bonfire for my boys, complete with smores and everything. The boys did not gorge themselves on smores until the verge of exploding. Nor did my 7 year old eat 5 of them when crazy Uncle Dave bet him a quarter that he couldn't do it. We have not been finding melted marshmallows on everything since then. My very polite 5 year old did not look up at my cousin, who was once the sheriff of Anderson and currently the head of security of all the racetracks in Indiana, and ask him "are you getting old or something". You see we teach our kids tact, and they would never say something like that. Nor did I have to take my 18 month old back inside because he kept running straight for the fire. Surely, he could feel that it was hot and would know to stay back.

We would never have left for our 17 hour trek back home on a Saturday night at 6 PM. The kids had school bright and early on Monday morning, and that would make the weekend so full of driving the kids would never be ready for school. It wasn't like watching our nephews' play college football would have been worth that. I mean isn't it everyday we get to do something like that? Our boys never like riding in the car for long trips so they would not already be scheming on how to get back to Indiana soon to go fishing with their cousins. Hmmm, Zach graduates from college in May...