Plenty of Pictures (long post)

Well, today I will have plenty of pictures, virtually all of which come from about 45 minutes to an hour out of our day. Today my lovely wife is on-call, usually on a weekend call we try to visit for lunch or dinner but she has been VERY busy today and, well, there were some behavior issues earlier in the day. DS#3 took a 2+ hour nap today, this solved some of those issues.

Remember the post below where I said I would be trying to keep the kids inside this afternoon due to all of our outdoors time earlier in the week and the tremendous heat? Well, during lunch a certain person (DS#2) started talking about playing outside with water balloons. DD joined in because she LOVED using water balloons in place of soccer balls to practice "heading" at soccer camp this week. DS#1, well, he was ALL for it. I had them wait until later in the afternoon because I knew that this would keep DS#3 up and he needed a nap. He did wake up shortly (okay, immediately) after they went outside to start filling water balloons. After a "snack" ie. an early supper, he came out to watch the excitement.

It takes a while to fill water balloons, particularly when they are old, and they needed help tying them off. Really, DS#1 got stuck filling AND tying off a lot of balloons but I tried to help with a few so they could collect enough to last more than a minute or two. I took some video (that won't be up for a while) and a LOT of pictures with my lovely wife's new(est) lens. The shade in the backyard is very nice for keeping down the heat when it hits 100+ degrees here, but it makes good pictures VERY difficult. I shot well over 50 pictures and already deleted over 30. There are more that my lovely wife will get rid of, but I want her to get an idea of the chaos, er, "fun."

Sigh, the distractions here are insane at the moment. In any case, I wanted to post the pictures with some "captions" or maybe even explanations, but I sort-of forgot what I was originally going to title some of these. Whoops! (yes, CB, I put the pictures toward the END of my horribly long post ;) ). --Oh, if you are seeing this as a Facebook note, well, the spacing is going to be WAY off, sorry.
The Warriors Prepare












The Ringleader













The Princess

















The Armsmaster (okay, this is the one where I had a funny title, but, um, it got killed by a nerf gun battle--No, I do not have pictures of the kids, particularly DS#3, with the nerf guns, I was TRYING to post to the blog darn it!












The Charmer













Okay, aside here, I HAD to get a picture of DS#3 wearing his hat so I took lots of pictures trying to get a nice shot. I think this is one of the best, but there were literally close to 20 pictures that included him in some way.













Can you even think of a water balloon war that didn't end up with someone using the hose?

Personally, I can't think of one. Of course, in San Antonio we are in a drought and on "Stage I Water Restrictions" which means (unless it is your one day of the week) you need to "hand water" your lawn. Now, I don't know of anyone that would allow children to have a water balloon fight in the backyard (only on the grass kids!) in such a drought. Do you?