Oh people, this post is gonna have some pictures.

Blake goes to judo on Wednesdays after work so it’s just me and the kids and this Wednesday past, it was really warm out so I told the kids it was okay to get the sidewalk chalk out and draw on the driveway since Blake took the car so the driveway was vacant.

So, they drew on the driveway for a while and I took about a million pictures as I tend to do, and as this was going on, Alyssa and her little brother Cory from up the street stopped by to see what Wes & Madison were doing. Just as they showed up, I was coming back outside with three giant jugs of bubble solution and that’s when the party began.

Wes eating bubbles.

Madison blowing bubbles.

Alyssa and Madison

I am way too lazy to go through all 50 pictures I took and remove our house number from them so you all won’t know where I live, so I’m trusting you all not to be stalker types and show up on my doorstep, mmmkay?

A little while after Alyssa and Cory showed up, my neighbour Judy came home from work and I asked her if Courtney could come out and play. Judy’s significant other, Wayne, works nights and goes to bed shortly before Courtney gets home from school and wakes up again to make dinner and get Courtney showered…so I didn’t knock on their door when the block party began happening in case Wayne was sleeping or Courtney was having dinner. But, as I said, Judy came home from work and sent Courtney out to play with the rest of the kids.

Here’s where I pause from the mayhem to talk about myself a little bit. As anyone reading this knows, I’m agoraphobic and one of the things I normally can’t do is be in the front of my house to even maintain my garden because I’m afraid of my neighbours (Courtney’s parents) talking to me and I have this total complex where I think all of the people in the cars passing by are looking at me and thinking what a fat cow I am or how crappy my house is. Also? I’m not a huge fan of kids, as a rule. My kids don’t have birthday parties or sleepovers at our house, partially because our house is REALLY small and an extra body is significantly noticed, but also because I just don’t want to deal with an extra kid or 5. My kids have birthday parties outside the house, like taking friends to the movies or bowling and stuff like that.

So, for me to be in the front of my house for like, 2 hours, with all these kids and even talking to my neighbours (my other neighbour was getting in his car and he said hi & that our new window looked nice) is kind of a huge deal. This means that the immersion therapy is beginning to work. The whole time I was outside I was IN MY PAJAMAS and just didn’t care what anyone thought. Kids don’t care what you look like or how much I weigh or if I’m wearing makeup and if they don’t care, I’m betting no one else does either. Unless they’re judgemental assholes and why should I care what judgemental assholes think of me?

Anyway, back to the party…

Wes and Madison

Madison and Courtney

Wes and Cory

At this point Alyssa had to go home because she got in trouble for not being where she said she’d be but that was how her big sister Emily was alerted to the festivities, so she came over to play too.

Courtney, Emily and Cory

Courtney, Cory and Wes

Then the kids sort of gave up on bubbles for a while and as you can see, Madison brought out the hula hoops and a skipping rope.

Emily hula hooping.

When the girls started jumping rope, they were singing the songs that go with jumping rope (that I don’t know) and at the end of one of them they started singing “Madison and uh…sitting in a tree….uh….” so I yelled out “Ashton!” because that’s who was Madison’s boyfriend two weeks ago and who she still likes (for reasons completely unknown to me, the kid’s a shit, she was “going out” with him during his birthday and bought him a Star Wars figure with her own money and then he dumped her right before her birthday, we figure, so he wouldn’t be obligated to buy her a present. Schmuck.) Anyway, Madison’s reaction to me yelling out his name is forever immortalized here:

While Wes did try to jump rope, the boys pretty much deemed the activity boring and decided to play on the porch, where I snapped this pic:

BEE EFF EFFS

After this, I was wanting to wrap things up and send the kids home, but I decided to go inside and get a drink first because I had a plan for breaking up the party and calling Wes & Madison in, but while I was inside, Madison dragged out the wagon and more mayhem ensued.

By the time they were done with the wagon rides, it was definitely time to call it quits, so how do you call your kids home and deem the party over? Why you play the Chicken Dance out the window, of course!

And then all the kiddies went home to have baths, unwind and go to sleep. And that’s the end of the story.

During the entire course of this “happening”, I took 885 pictures and it’s taken me almost three days to choose the best ones and edit them down to 50. If you’d like to see the rest of the pictures, and there are some good ones, the gallery can be found here.