Valencia Family Memoirs: Dirt Day With Cousins

A couple of Saturdays ago, we had some the kids' cousins over to play. It was originally just going to be Rafael. But I couldn't break little Kiko's heart again, so he stayed to play as well. Armando was supposed to be home all day, but he ended up getting more work than expected. The kids were too loud so Ezra only got a few minutes of a nap in which made the day a little bit more work than I'd hoped. Then about half way into the day, my niece Sarah called and asked if she and her kids could come over to visit. She had Jeramiah with her also (our niece Elda's son). 7 kids total. 2 little girls, 5 little boys...all ages 5 and under. Crazy! Jeramiah is 5, Rafael and Esperanza are 4, Kiko and Yareli are 3 and Estevan and Ezra are 1. Whew! They had soooo much fun playing together! Sarah went to the store to get food to cook for dinner at one point and somehow got lost. It was just me and all these kids for over an hour! I didn't even try to supervise anything. All I did was count heads every now and again to make sure they were all there. It was pretty entertaining.

A few funnies:

Kiko speaks very little, if any, English. I kept asking Rafael to translate for me. He wouldn't though. He would just stare at me. At one point in the day, Kiko kept telling me the same thing over and over again and I had absolutely NO clue what he was saying. My response each time was "yo no compredo, habla me en English" (I think that is some version of "I don't understand, talk to me in English"). He still kept saying the same thing in Spanish. Finally, Esperanza, who must have gotten frustrated herself by the communication problem, yells "MOM, he is saying he wants to play with the train!". She understood what Kiko was asking for and eventually decided to take the initiative to translate for me. There was a little train set that I had put away earlier and apparently, he wanted to play with it again. This proved to me that Esperanza understands way more Spanish than she is usually willing to admit.

Sarah's son Estevan is a couple month older than Ezra. He might be short, but this kid is solid. He's a tank and will plow through anything in his way. He would touch Ezra, and Ezra would fall down. After the first or second time, Estevan began to like pushing Ezra down and Ezra became scared of him. He's see Estevan coming towards him and would instantly cry and run to me. It was funny and sad at the same time. I started calling Estevan a bully. In Ezra's defense, he did miss his nap that day.

Here are some pictures of the day. I always wonder what events, moments and days will become part of my kids' future memories. I hope that some of these blog posts will still be around for these kids to look at in the future to trigger memories and/or enjoy remembering moments through these pictures.

We built a fort over the pool outside for them to play in

Rafa, Kiko and Esperanza

Kiko and his dirty face

He's sooo darn cute

Our 'great' nephew Jeramiah. He was the oldest of the bunch that day. At 5 years old, he started Kindergarten this year.

Boys, dirt and trucks.

Kiko was dropped off wearing white shorts and a white shirt. I immediately dropped what I was doing when I took a look at him and pulled down the 3T bin from the garage shelf and changed him. Good thing. This kid was covered from head to toe in dirt within minutes.

Esperanza had also put white on that morning. I forgot to change her before she started playing in dirt. Oh well, it's almost too small for her anyways.