Pictures (by Kelsey) from Our Houston Visit

As I said in a previous post, I wasn't able to get many pictures during our Houston visit. I had a malfunction of my memory card. (All right. If I must, I will admit that the malfunction was with the operator, not the memory card. I thought I had my 32-gig memory card with me, and couldn't figure out why I could only take 5 pictures before it said it was full. Come to find out, my 32-gig card was at home, sitting on my desk, and the one in my camera was only 32-meg. It DID have a big "32" on it! Silly Grandma!). 

Anyway, now that Kelsey has posted some pictures on her blog, I was able to "steal" a few to display here:

Clara, the Spring Fairy, during her song/dance number.

Clara is holding the giant "J" (for Judd) made out of Legos. Chris and the kids are Lego-maniacs (my terminology) and this cute Father's Day gift will hang on the wall in their game room.

Grandpa with his Father's Day gifts.

Kelsey was raving about her new-found Snoballs shack - shave-ice with a zillion different varieties of home-made syrups. So we had to try them out. Sure tasted good on this hot, muggy day. Mine was Rootbeer Float flavor - yum! Robert went for the Ninja Turtle syrup! Ha!

Robert was attending VBS this week, and the theme was "Science." Here he is, our mad scientist.

Painting - Cabin on the Lake

Here's my most recent painting. I started it just before my knee surgery, and just finished it today. At least I am calling it finished, however my teacher may have suggestions for me on Tuesday, so there could be minor adjustments. The part I found most challenging about this one was the reflection in the water.

Houston Visit

Now that I'm more comfortable sitting for longer periods, we were able to take a short road trip to visit Chris, Kelsey and the grands. We finally got to see their new house, and we think it's a perfect fit for their family. The best thing about the new house, according to Robert, is the backyard swimming pool! We drove over on the morning of Thursday, June 18, and returned home on Saturday. As always, I came with camera in hand, but was terribly disappointed when I found that my memory card was not working, for some reason. I took a few snapshots with my phone, but missed all of the pictures of Clara's performance.

Oh, yes . . .  Clara's performance! She participated in a summer theater camp, along with 90 or so other children, and Thursday night was their grand culminating performance. Every child had at least a few moments on stage, so you can imagine how long this play was! Clara was a Spring Fairy, and played her part very well. Clara loves being on stage and is always comfortable and confident in front of a crowd.

Later that night Dan, Clara and Robert competed in a Wii car race. If you look closely you will see that Clara is still wearing her Spring Fairy make-up.

Since we were all together, we celebrated Father's Day a wee bit early, with a Friday evening dinner at Texas Land and Cattle. Chris got a very clever handmade gift from his family, as well as a new Wii game. And Dan was surprised by two framed paintings from the children - their artistic interpretation of Juan Fangio's (Dan's favorite old-time Formula 1 race car driver) race car. Very cute!

As a side-note . . . we've had a number of inquiries about how we fared during the recent Texas storms. I'm happy to say that we had no serious problems here in our neighborhood. Tons of rain, some pretty big winds, thunder and lightning, but no damage. On our drive to Houston, we still saw fields with standing water from those storms, and all of the vegetation was very green and lush.