The Lost Texas Pictures

I scare myself. I thought I lost these pictures from Texas. I mourned for them. I truly thought I had somehow erased them from my camera and that they would never be seen again.

Then I found a disk. The very disk that I had taken to the store to have made while still in Texas, in order to make room on my camera card for more photos. I totally forgot about that ever happening. Duh.

Never mind, I'm just happy to have them now, despite the fact that I can't edit them at all, it must have something to do with how they were saved to the disk but it's beyond my photo editing knowledge so you'll just have to enjoy them as is, straight out of the camera. I'm just really happy to have them back. Sigh.

Here we are in Dallas at the hotel the night we arrived, we ordered ourselves a little midnight snack and then hit the hay for an amazing night's sleep.

In Tyler we stayed with our precious, precious friends the Knights. Here are Meggie and Katie with sweet Ann-Elizabeth who shared her room, her clothes, her toys - everything!
The lovely and generous Bice family invited us to spend a day with them swimming, eating ice-cream and having friends for dinner. We had a great day - but the pictures are kind of lousy, I blame the jetlag. Gotta blame something!

The girls at Braums - a favorite haunt just up the street from our old house.
Ellie splashing around in the pool:
Alex (I thought it was Josie but on closer inspection this is not one of our bathing suits) does the high dive:
Meggie and Josie with Alex (seriously, don't know what got on my lens).
Stefanie, me and Stephanie at dinner:
Jeff, Dugald and Todd:
Josie and her close friend Kate:
Katie and her BEST friend EVER - Maddie (how pale are we?)
Meggie and Alex:
Another day we headed out to the country to spend the afternoon with the Lackey family and the Andersons. Gabe, who is almost 8, drove the kids around the property in the golf cart. They were loving it!

Rachel, me and Sonja. I love these women!
And sweet Hope - this is the day I talked her into coming to Florida and giving us a hand at Disney. I'm so grateful she agreed!
The Andersons, Lackeys and Morrisons - there should be 13 kids here, we were missing Jordyn and Grayson.
Finally, pictures from a fun night out with the Abrameits. We headed to the Purple Pig for some yummy East Texas barbeque.
Dugald and Warren hamming it up as always!
Thank you God for my sweet friend Ann - love her too!!

Johnston Hill Reserve

This weekend the beautiful weather inspired us to attempt our first ever "tramp". . . or hike as we say in America. We started with an easy, beginners walk that is right in our backyard called Johnston Hill Reserve.

About ten seconds into our journey the girls were already complaining about walking uphill. Seriously. I mentioned to Dugald that their complaining was the exact reason I hadn't suggested we do this before - but honestly the day was too perfect to not enjoy the great outdoors so we told them to buck up. Here we are at the entrance:

The foliage is beautiful and I enjoyed trying out different shots with my camera - I so want to take a photography class one of these days!!
New Zealand bush is full of ferns and I just love them:
This technique of blurring the background has a name but I can't think of it at the moment and I'm already multi-tasking too many things to google it, but it looks pretty cool!
A view of Wellington as we ascended the hill on our walk:
I think this is gorse, which is lovely but invasive and has taken over many a hillside. Being as yellow is my favorite color I had to take a picture of it though, how can something so lovely be bad?
The windmills:
If you click on this picture to enlarge it you can see the snow on the tops of the mountains in the background which happen to be on the South Island. Wellington is on the very bottom of the North Island and on a clear day you can see the South Island across the Cook Strait.
More lovely scenery, especially the girls:




We started downhill energized and thinking what an easy walk it had been - we actually had to make the girls turn around and head down because they'd gotten over their initial hesitation and wanted to go on and on but we had somewhere to be and needed to head home.

We decided to take a different route and head toward Karori Cemetery to see if we could find where Dugald's grandparents were buried. We soon found ourselves on a narrower and muddier path, holding on to branches as we descended some of the slippery slopes in an effort to stay upright.
Water trickling in a brook beside us:

At last, the cemetery!!
The reason we needed to get on back to the car was because we had been invited to our friends for the afternoon to play games and hang out for dinner. When we got there their youngest, Rueben, wanted Dugald to hold him and would not let Dugald put him down!
After supper the girls put on a show:


Ellie was too tuckered out to participate so she watched from Daddy's lap which had been vacated only minutes before by Rueben:
We had a great evening, another fun night playing Settlers of Catan!

Budding Architects

I found the idea for this on another blog and the girls ate it up - literally!! We decided to be architects for the day and I gave each of the girls a bowl of marshmallows and a bag of toothpicks and told them to build their masterpiece.

They all began by building a foundation - cue Bible lesson on needing to build our lives on the strong foundation of Christ.

Some kept their construction projects flat - I have to admit that I left them to their own devices while I went to take a shower:
But the older two decided to build up, and up, and up:

Katie decided her house would be two stories tall:


Ellie went for flat star patterns:
Meggie was going for skyscraper, but this was as tall as the little toothpicks would allow:
Josie decided she was going to make jewelry instead of buildings:
All in all it was a pretty fun project for their morning tea!