After careful thought I figured that this wasn’t our third year but the fourth that we have held an annual cousins week. (Its five if you count our family vacation to South Dakota back in 2002 but we opted to count it separate since it involved the entire family and then some.) All in all it was a successful Cousins Week.
Monday July 17th,
The cousins arrived mid-afternoon. Excited chaos went on for the next few hours as the cousins got the intial “I am so happy & excited to see you!” out of the way. They even got a few hours of Auntie C’s time as Auntie P & I along with Lil’B ran to the store to procure the necessary levels of snacks, foods and beverages to get us through the upcoming week. A quick but yummy supper of spaghetti, salad & fruit compote finished off our day. Why is that significant - well we ran to the store to get food, got home at 5:35 and still managed to unload, put away and cook a supper by 6:30 
I thought it was reasonably impressive!! We sisters chatted long into the night though my younger two sisters did most of the chatting along with our mom as I went to bed in preparation for the next day.
Tuesday
Today we stayed home to give everyone a chance to settle into the days routine at our house. We did attempt to do our homeschool work but I quickly realized that the Cousins served as to big of a distraction so we opted to have a week full of art projects, story books and the like. Leaving the assignments etc to be caught up later. We put together flower cut and paste projects while Lil’E kept Great-Gramma company along with Gramma. The older kids had visited with Great-Gramma in the morning as well as after they finished up the craft project. Lil’B was off napping after having a very full morning of play with his cousins.
Wednesday
Science Center + 5 children = one tired mommy (and a mildly empty wallet!) Whoa lunch at the Science Center was a little costly! Youch! $38 for lunch for all of us. It sucks that you can’t bring in your own picnic (though truthfully I wasn’t really as organized as I need to be to get a picnic ready anyway). The kids love, LOVE the science center. The little guys (3 & 2) played in the small discoveries section for an hour or so happily sharing, running around and generally having a good time. RANT: Why do they bother to have a bubble section if the bubble stuff WILL NOT make BUBBLES???
We also visted the titanic exhibit. I may take Jr. back as he enjoyed it immensely (in the sense of watching a ship crash) the whole loss of life/tragedy didn’t really touch him which is okay with me. He has time to focus on that later. They were all very impressed with the iceberg and had a grand ole time seeing how long they could touch it.
Thursday
Home day! I am only being brave every other day though I can see that some of the things I had thought to do won’t work well this year. Lil’B & Lil’E are a tad more difficult to keep going in the same direction than I anticipated. So what was our plan today???
Friday
I forgot my camera.
Nonetheless we had a nice visit to the Prairie Refuge. The highlight according to the kids was that they got to play with Buffalo hides and bones. Though the badger home (enlarged to make a kids play area) also got good reviews. The nature trail walk was fun and just long enough to wear little legs out but not to the point of exhaustion. I was so happy that the weather cooperated with a lovely summer day.
More of Cousins Week later!
