A very cousin Saturday

Rosie's family moved to Tennessee in June, which means that we really, truly are close enough to visit now—no excuses! Except that we were supposed to get together for the 4th...but Rosie's girls got hand, foot, and mouth disease...and then soon after they recovered they got fifth's disease...and we've been battling our own viruses down here in Georgia. But this weekend we managed to finally get together!

Because they're living in a short-term rental until their house is ready for them, they made the trip down to us! They arrived on Friday afternoon and the kids played hard in the basement until dinner (but I left my phone upstairs and didn't take any pictures of them—we were just having a fun time catching up).

Rosie took this picture of the kids playing on a teeter-totter downstairs: 

And I took these pictures of dinner:

Andrew made challah bread French toast. It was delicious!

After we put the kids to bed we stayed up late talking (Austin pointed out that he hasn't seen us for seven years somehow—we've done video chats with him at times and we've seen Rosie and her girls multiple times...but he's always been either stuck at school or at work). 

In the morning we got up, had breakfast, and went to the pool. We wanted to get there before it was too hot (and hopefully before it was too crowded). We rarely go to the pool on the weekend simply because...we go a lot during the week...so I wasn't sure how crowded it would be (and imagined it would be at least a little bit crowded). When we arrived the parking lot was packed...but everyone was there for a tennis tournament and we basically had the pool to ourselves (and then the few people that had been there before us left so we really did have the pool to ourselves). 

Here are the littlest ones getting into the pool:

Phoebe had so much fun with her cousins! She told me she wished they could stay forever. I told her that we would definitely visit with them again soon—because they live so close now (relatively speaking).

Here's a view of some of our party swimming around:

Here's Benjamin trying to help Ireland to swim (she really does pretty well on her own; Rosie has had her in swim lessons for quite a while now):

Here's Zoë "the baby whisperer" with all the little girls:

Phoebe, Oaklyn, Zoë, Ireland

Before they arrived she told me she was going to be the baby whisperer, but I reminded her that the girls have grown up quite a bit since she'd seen them last, so she said, "Fine. I'll be the little girl whisperer!" And she really was. Ireland trailed her like a little puppy the whole time. And Oaklyn didn't mind her too much either (though like Phoebe at around that age, Oaklyn prefers men—so when they first arrived Oaklyn was kind of giving everyone the stink eye and just doing her own thing...until Andrew walked into the play room and then all of a sudden she started bringing him toys to look at and yammering at him—he was quite pleased to be selected as her favourite new person).

Here we are getting ready to go home and grab some lunch:

It's so hot out that we just played inside for the afternoon. Benjamin challenged Austin to Mario Kart and then the kids ended up playing for a bit (after Austin smashed Benjamin). Here you can see Oaklyn is carting around Garbage Baby.

The little girls were getting a little emotional after spending so much time trying to share their things and be in each other's space and behave and follow the rules (not to mention some skipped naps). We did lots of things to try to keep them on good terms with each other. This picture looks like a sweet moment (and it was) but it (also) wasn't:

Garbage Baby (on the table in front of Phoebe) was a hot commodity. They only stopped fighting over her when I convinced Phoebe to pull out her other dolls. And then Ireland and Oaklyn got in an epic fight over another doll with a "binky" attached to its outfit. It was quite the fight. 

"Why is Oaklyn crying so much just because Ireland has that baby doll?" Phoebe wanted to know (as if she hadn't been crying about having to share Garbage Baby earlier, as if she wouldn't later throw a huge fit because Ireland was playing with the puppy with the blue collar (the one Phoebe wanted) rather than the nearly-identical puppy with the pink collar (which neither girl wanted)). 

I suggested dot markers to take people's minds off things...so in this picture Ireland is grabbing an armful of markers while Phoebe is telling her that she can only use one at a time...

They had a bit of a fight over these as well (even though we have two boxes of them).

Eventually we took them back down to the play room to get some big energy out on the roller coaster and jungle gym and things. Benjamin set up a big crash landing place and was pushing those kids down the roller coaster so fast!

Here's Ireland taking a turn:

And here's a series of shots showing Benjamin pushing Phoebe down (so you can see how hard they were crashing at the end—they thought it was hilarious):

You can also see that Phoebe eventually traded Garbage Baby for Pink Baby (such a gracious host).

While Austin went out to grab pizza for dinner (with Oaklyn in tow to give her some time away from everyone), Phoebe played Littlest Pet Shops by herself in the basement, and Zoë helped Ireland do some puzzles. It was lovely and quiet. 

Rachel, Benjamin, and I worked on some salads to go with dinner (a fruit salad and a green salad) and Rosie chatted to us...and all of us forgot to check in on Austin...though we were getting increasingly hungry. 

Soon Andrew came into the kitchen and said, "So, I think Austin is lost...I got a message from him on Discord about five minutes ago saying I'm lost help hahaha..."

"Oh, no!" Rosie said, looking at her phone. "I missed a call from him ten minutes ago! I didn't even notice!"

He'd forgotten to make a note of our address before leaving to pick up the pizza and then simply couldn't remember how to get back to our house. Luckily, we told him the story about Benjamin being stung by a bunch of yellow jackets and Andrew visiting the Ingles for after-sting medication instead of the CVS (and then we drove by the CVS on the way to the pool this morning), so Austin thought if he told his GPS to take him to CVS he'd at least be in the vicinity of our house. And he was right! So he was already pretty close to home by the time we got him our address.

I suppose equally luckily the kids begged Rosie to get on our Discord server so they could send her messages (I am not sure whether she knows what she's getting into) and Austin joined it, too...which meant he was set up to ping Andrew that way since we were all ignoring our phones.

After dinner Rosie and Austin packed up their two very tired children and drove way—but not before lots of hugs were administered:

I sent the picture below to my mom, and she said that she could hardly tell who was in that hug—it was such a joyful jumble. And she's not wrong!

We're so excited to have them so close by!