At Last!!: Ahes, Ashes...we all ...go beserk!

Remember when I said that I wouldn't drag out old pictures of Henry? Well I lied.

Check this out.

Henry's first Ash Wednesday.

Henry this evening after the ASH WEDNESDAY CHILDREN'S SERVICE.

So Ben's mom and I decided to pick up the boys from Ms. Karen's and take them to a Children's Ash Wednesday Service at a church near the school. Safe, right? Well, I think that we each thought that it might be a struggle and the boys may be tired, but I also think that we each thought that our child was generally pretty well behaved in public. Seriously, Henry is great at church and in public (for the most part) and what I've seen of Ben, he is just a sweet little cuddle bug. What we hadn't anticipated were the following factors;

unfamiliar environment for all-moms included
dinner time
the expectation of good behavior after a day of carousing
two boys (very familiar with each other in a play environment) outside of a play environment
no toys
advertised "children's service" with the hidden meaning of "well-behaved" children's service
Every age group represented with the exception of the 1-3 age range (hmmm, there may be something to that). For those of you not familiar with the 1-3 age range-that is when they are walking and talking/screaming very loud and fast with absolutely no concept of where they are. In other words-no social graces. Kind of like animals-but so darned cute-which is why we humans don't eat our young.

So basically it was a free for all. Of course the all only included Kristen, Ben, Henry and I. All of the other children were exceptionally (think Stepford Wives/scary) well behaved. Thankfully the priest seemed to be unphased and welcomed all of the children and was happy to have so many at the service. The portion of the service that I was able to pay attention to was really quite sweet and totally geared to the children. The rest of the time I was stuffing Cheerios in Henry's mouth to keep him from screaming across the church at Ben. I think the two of them thought it was just so cool to be able to see each other in another place. Very exciting. But not as exciting as hearing the crunch of Cheerios under my shoe with every step up the aisle to get our ashes. Yep, I am now, officially, one of those mothers (nice).

So here are the two shots that I took (yes, during the service) just before the boys decided to army-crawl under the railing onto the alter. It's a bit blurry because I was actually laughing and trying to hold the camera still.

Here's Kristen after "rescuing" Ben from the alter by grabbing his pants and dragging him back-which resulted in his jeans somewhere around his ankles. Hysterical. Oh, did I mention, Kristen's four months pregnant?