Day 1783. Finally a day with nowhere to go, at least in the morning! However, Sammy is always up early, no matter what day it is. Emmy comes next, and Tammy last. Usually Randy gets up before Tammy to make breakfast for them. Today I enjoyed being able to stay in bed. Of course, Emmy never lets me sleep but keeps coming and waking me up. I was glad, when Randy finally went downstairs with them.
Just after 10 am I got up and went to the kitchen to get the food to a point where it could simmer on the stove while I was teaching my 11 am to noon lesson. After I was done teaching, I returned to the kitchen to finish getting lunch ready, then we all sat down to eat.
After lunch, I would have liked some rest, but Sammy came to me and wanted to look at videos of themselves. Then Tammy joined us as well, and we watched recent videos as well as some of when they were 2 years old. That lasted a while, then they left, and eventually Randy took them downstairs.
But Emmy kept coming upstairs. I was ready for a nap, but it was not meant to be. With 3 pm approaching, we got ourselves ready to leave the house to go to church. We hadn't been there in a while. We took the 3:30 pm train and then the subway and got to church just before 4 pm, which is when the service starts.
We ran into a group of people right away and found out that the service starts at 6 pm during the summer, not at 4 pm. How disappointing! We were wondering what to do. We left again and walked through the mall in the direction of McDonald's where we had planned to eat dinner after the service. The kids were saying they were hungry, so we were going to have dinner early. On the way there, we passed through the entertainment area, and as we had time, we let the kids go into the Kids Corner. Emmy wanted to ride the car, and Randy put Sammy behind him and walked him to make sure Sammy wasn't falling off, while Emmy tried to take the tight curves. Tammy in the meantime had found a whack-a-mole game she liked. Then all three got into a stationary car with a video screen, and the car moved once you put the coin in. Then we left to continue walking in the direction of McDonald's. We walked by the passport picture machine, and as Randy needs a passport picture on Tuesday, we stopped so he could get his passport pictures. They turned out fine.
Our next time stop was McDonald's.They liked their toys, and we had a good time eating. It was still a long time until 6 pm. Should we wait until then?
We then left McDonald's and started walking in the direction of the church. Tammy, Emmy and I ended up going into a kind of dollar store because we saw the cones for the first day of school being sold. They also had schoolbags for sale there, so I told the kids about how they're gonna get a cone full of goodies on their first day of school and also a nice schoolbag like what they were selling. We looked at a few more items and then left the shop to rejoin Randy and Sammy who had taken the elevator while we had taken the escalator. From then on Tammy was all excited about school and kept saying how much she was looking forward to going to school. I kept reminding her that it was still over a year until then.
We got to church early, about 20 minutes before the service was to start, but there were already a good number of people there. And so we talked to a few people, while the kids started having fun with people right away. Sammy had been asking to see Janos, our friend, and had mentioned his name about a 100 times in the previous few hours. And so he was really happy, when Janos came through the door. He greeted him, and Janos picked him up, much to his delight, while I took a picture of them.
After he was back with me and I set him on the floor, Tammy decided to play with Sammy. Sammy was crawling on the floor, and Tammy also lay down on the floor to crawl like him. She then stayed with him pretty much the whole first hour of the service which was all worship. I really enjoyed watching her interact with Sammy this whole time, and Sammy clearly enjoyed it as well. She helped him where she could and even lifted him up one time. As for Emmy, he first stayed seated on a chair but then started dancing, and he was doing a great job. His style made me think that he would enjoy breaking (breakdance). On the way home, I showed him videos of guys doing breakdance, and he really enjoyed it. I then researched it and found out that there are classes for kids his age.
The worship time ended at 7 pm, after communion, and we decided it was time to go home as it was getting late. They're normally in bed by 8 pm. We walked to the subway, took it to the train station and then waited for our train. We took the 8:23 train and were home at about 8:40 pm. We gave them a quick shower and then got them ready for bed. They had a few more bites to eat, and I read them a story and prayed for them. Then they went to bed. For me it got really late again, as it's 1:30 am and high time to go to bed.
