Chaos Pushes Family of Four to Move to New York!!

I know that I’ve done enough talk about our small group to make you sick of it. So I won’t rehash and explain how it all works – I’ll just remind you of the stats, for the purposes of this blog:

• 6 couples,
• 14 kids under 6 years old, and
• 2 more on the way.

We’ve been busy.

Here’s our group photo without the kids:

Don’t we look calm and collected?

(For those of you who read about these people all the time and want to put faces to names, we are, clockwise starting from the back left: Chris, Me, Christen, Ryan, Ashley, David (AJ’s Mom and Dad), Greg, Chuck, Lydia (of Mom Jeans and the Dreaded Long Butt fame), Julie, Christie, and Jarrod.)

At any rate, we’re losing one of our couples, Jarrod and Christie(one of the only dual-blog families I know), to New York, where Jarrod will be pastoring a Grace Community Church.

And, although we can’t deny God’s handiwork in the whole deal, we’re none too happy about them leaving us.

So, we have had a whole week of good-bye parties for them.

Before we met for our last get-together Tuesday night, the guys all wanted to go out for one last gluttonous feeding frenzy at Jarrod’s home away from home, The Golden Corral.

They didn’t have to say “No Girls Allowed”, because, well, none WANTED to be allowed.

So, us girls decided to make the best of our husbandless situation and all meet for dinner at a much more refined establishment, Richard’s.

Which means that our odds were 6 mommies (1/3 of which are pregnant) to 14 children.

No, you can’t see all fourteen children because the table was just plain too crowded. But trust me. They were there. If there could be audio with this picture, you would KNOW that they were ALL there.

The girl + Radford end of the table was pretty calm,

And was limited to quiet games like Ali teaching Radford how to play pee-pie (is THAT how you spell that?!?!? Sounds disgusting),

But the lessons being taught at the boy’s end of the table were much more nasal noisy.

At any rate, we managed to make it through dinner without a SINGLE drink being spilled, without our waiter going insane (although I think he might have been close), AND without the Fire Marshall coming in and shutting the place down due to overcrowding.

We got back to Lydia’s house and began the arduous task of getting all of the kids calmed down for bedtime.

When the men showed up.

The men, who had been on their own self-indulgent dinner out with NO kids whatsoever, showed up with TWELVE balloon swords.

In three seconds flat (which is how long it takes for 12 kids to grab a sword and take off), the house went from a low, sleepy rumble to ear piercing shrieks, screams, the irritatingly squeaky sound of balloon-on-balloon combat.

Even Zechariah got in on the action, despite his size-to-balloon-ratio disadvantage:

The only one of the big kids to stay out of the mix was Abby, who was far too concerned with messing up her carefully coordinated bedtime ensemble:

Now obviously, us women were a bit, well, “curious”, as to how the guys just happened upon twelve balloon swords while they were at dinner, since they would know full well, of course, that we would be trying to get the kids to bed….ahem.

The story that we got was that it was Kid’s Night at Golden Corral, and they made friends with Spidey himself:

And, although they NEVER mentioned to Spiderman that they had kids, he just happened to come from the kid’s area with an army of children who delivered twelve swords directly and ONLY to our men, the EXACT number of sword-bearing-aged kids waiting for them to return home.

It sounded just a bit sketchy to us women.

So we cross-examined, in separate rooms, our husbands – subtly, of course.

And they ALL had the same story.

They obviously made sure their stories lined up before they left The Mecca of Man Chow.

At any rate, their ringleader and Honored Man of the Night, Jarrod, who egged the kids on to the nth degree, got his just reward (I never insist on watching videos, but you MUST watch this video to truly understand the chaos of the evening):

After that attack, I’m pretty sure he’s ready to get his butt on up to New York, post-haste.

Yes, the attack was brutal. It was violent. It was deafening. The fun obviously must be ended. So we confiscated all swords, and all agreed that all children must be IMMEDIATELY rounded up, calmed down, and put to sleep as soon as possible, by whatever means necessary.

But there’s always the one that gets away…

Disclaimer: No ill will toward our husbands is intended or implied. After all, without them, this would have made for a dull blog.