I don’t dwell on the negative stuff in the blog, else there would be tomes of rants and whines and pity parties. But I have to say today pretty much sucked. We have two sick boys AND two sick men. Patience is short, as is sleep. There was a ton of screaming, fighting, throwing, and just plain stress. We had good intentions and nothing we wanted to do seemed possible because of toddler tantrums and medical needs.
Brendan is a little better, but not great. Trevor is worse. Bill and Granddaddy have the stuffed noses and sore throats. I am exhausted. There was lots of vomit.

That aside, lets get back to the cute, funny and positive.

Granddaddy brought with him a couple of old train sets that were mine and Aunt Heather’s when we were kids. He did a lot of work to restore them and we bought some new tracks. We got it all set up on the kitchen table and made sure it all worked. Trevor immediately made it clear that he was far too young for these real train sets so we packed it all right back up to store for later.

After being disappointed with the toy stores, I thought I would try Craigslist to see if I could get them a more age appropriate train toy to use with Granddaddy. I never expected to come upon the deal of the century! We bought stuff from two different people. The first was a couple that had a Geotrax train table set like what cousin Caleb has, new in the box for a huge discount. The second was a family that had collected the Geotrax sets for years and was trying to unload their whole dusty collection from the garage. There were four giant plastic totes and three garbage bags full of buildings, tracks, cars, and more, including several Pixar Cars sets that cost more than what I paid for the whole thing. It was amazing! It all needs some TLC and cleaning, but there is easily more than $600 worth of toys for a fraction of the cost.

Brendan ponders the box

We thought we had actually succeeded in stopping the tantrums for a while. The boys were very interested in all the new stuff

I loved seeing the boys both eager to “help”!

“Where do we begin?”

I was so frustrated when I found a piece that I thought was broken plastic from the toys. Already! Turns out it was just a dessicated mac and cheese noodle. All hope was not lost.

Out of the whole day, we did have a few hours of nice play time. Trevor spent an hour or more on the front porch with Bill using the garden hose to wash some of the pieces. We had to separate the boys because Trevor was grabbing Brendan’s cheek, digging in his nails and twisting. Then he was grabbing Brendan’s head and pulling him over.
They can be so good though. Briefly. It is so hard to deal with the aggression.

I hate desperately watching the clock hoping that bedtime would come quickly. I just wanted today to be over. I haven’t even looked in most of the tubs and bags of the cool new stuff. We have enough to make a Geotrax city to cover the entire living room floor and then some.
I hope tomorrow we can enjoy it and that everyone will feel better.