Controlled chaos

I have blogged before about the get-togethers we have had with Laura, Chelsea and Karen and their families. We've had pool parties, Christmas parties and dumpling making parties.  We've been to the zoo.  We all spent the weekend together in Pinetop.

I volunteered to host our Fall 2011 get-together.

The day started at the Phoenix Children's Museum.

Michael and Spencer spent some time in a flying bathtub.

The kids played with the coolest sand table.

And rode bikes through the car wash.

There was painting.

And grocery shopping.

Spencer made a delicioso pizza.

The men waited and waited and waited for a beer.

We forgot to take a group picture of the four of us, but we did get two in one and two in another.

After the museum and lunch at Jason's Deli, Karen and her family went back to their house for nap time.  Everyone else came to our house where nobody napped.

The kids spent the afternoon tearing the house apart and then Karen and crew came back over for a chili feast.

We moved our kitchen table into the dining room so everybody could sit together.

This was the best we could do for a picture of the entire group. Josh is taking the picture, Tyler is hidden and all that can be seen of me is my hand.  It'll have to do.  It's hard to get 12 people (5 of them under the age of 5) in one shot.

Chelsea, Lilly, Zac, Laura, Josh and Sara all spent the night on Saturday.  It was amazingly calm and everybody slept.

This morning we loaded all of the kids up and headed to breakfast.  Tyler was sick so they did not come meet us.  Boo.

The aftermath of all of this was that we now have a lot of chili in the freezer waiting for when Elliott is born and I took a 3 hour nap today.

The next get together is at Chelsea's house for Christmas.  After that we'll be adding two more children to the mix: Elliott and a as-of-now-unnamed-baby-girl in Laura's belly.

One more baby and the kids will overtake the adults.  Yikes.