Visit with the Kids and Grands

We drove to Spring on Monday morning to spend a day with the kids. We arrived around lunch time, and all of us, except Clara, went to lunch at Bullritos. It was Presidents' Day, so Chris and Robert both had the day off. Clara's school, on the other hand, had no holiday, much to our granddaughter's chagrin. Her mama told us that she lost count of how many times she had heard "Not fair" that morning before school. At 2:30 I went with Kelsey to fetch Clara from school, and, although "Hi Grandma!" were the first words out of her mouth, right on their heels came, "It wasn't fair that I had to go to school today."

Robert made the most of those first couple hours, when he had us all to himself. We played and played and played, and laughed and laughed and laughed. I tried to get some good pictures, but the little fellow is so active and wiggly that it's tough. Here are a couple of shots that, at least, show how much he is growing and changing. (Also see the photo in the post just prior to this one.)

Playing with Daddy. They both have Lego addictions.

After dinner, Clara had a hard decision to make. Should she bake something in her Easy Bake Oven, with Grandma? Or should she play Minecraft with Grandpa? There wasn't time for both since it was a school night. She finally decided to bake with Grandma, since that meant that she would get a little dessert afterward, with emphasis on the word "little" as the cookies were each about the size of a nickel.

There were just enough strawberry-with-lemon-frosting sandwich cookies for each of us to get one.

That evening there was a big thunder and lightning storm that moved in. After the little ones went to bed, we waited for a pause in the heavy rain and drove to our hotel, where we would spend the night. We hadn't been able to book a room in either of our usual hotels. This one was in an unfamiliar (to us) area of Houston, near the airport. One of the major roads we had to travel on was FM-1960. When we got there we found all of the traffic lights AND all of the street lights out, I guess because of the storm. It was a white-knuckle trip down that road. It was so dark that we couldn't tell where the intersections were, and we were concerned that cars coming from the cross streets would come through the intersections without stopping. Thanks, first, to the Lord, then to Dan's good driving, and, finally, to our GPS, we navigated it all safely. I'm not sure we've ever been more relieved to arrive at a home away from home.

For our trip back to Temple, on Tuesday morning, the sun was shining in a clear blue sky.