Day Four: A good day in El Paso

Jesus said, "Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf is welcoming me ..." Matthew 18.5
I took a short walk around the base nearby our Lodge this morning ... just for a bit of solitude before the start of our day. We weren't scheduled to be over to Jesse's until about 10:00, so I walked for about 35 minutes. It was a gorgeous morning here, and even at 8:30 when I was outside, it was really really warm! I reviewed the first 12 verses of Ephesians that I've been memorizing and decided that for the next few days, I would just remain in "review mode" as opposed to taking on any new verses to commit to memory.Across the street from the base lodge where we are staying, they are building an Army museum. The parking lot (pictured above) already has a lot of interesting stuff to look at.

Grandpa Jones and I arrived over at Jes and Di's at 10:00 and spent about a half hour with Matthew before he had to catch his bus for pre-K. We put together three puzzles and talked to him about what he was going to do at school. It was fun to have some one-on-one time with him, which hardly ever happens! We walked over to the bus stop, put him on the bus, and then spent the next four hours with Jesse and Diana, without any children home ... and I can't remember when that has EVER happened before. We had a nice time visiting with them.

Matthew returns home from school about 45 minutes before the other kids. So we got to met him at his bus stop ...

And then we watched as he did some of his penmanship papers and talked to him about his school day for a little while. But then we had to go back to the bus stop to meet the other kids. The afternoon heat around here is enough to knock me out ... it's like a furnace blast. Jesse says this mid-90 stuff is actually "cool" to what they've had for the prior 10-12 weeks here in Texas, and then when he was in Iraq, it was regularly in the 120's out in the desert. He said the air alone was enough to make a person's skin fry!
I think Chris and Emma were pretty happy to have us come to their bus stop today ...

We did a whole bunch of different things after they were home from school. We played inside, we played outside, we made a hopscotch, we met some neighbor friends, we played some games ...

The "extra" child in this picture is their neighbor, Sienna. She is four and is such a cutie.

We ate out at the Golden Corral tonight because ... it's a fun thing to do. Emma ate three huge plates of food! Chris too! Matthew cleaned every single piece of food from his plates and kept begging for more. Needless to say, we had a fun time together there.
I don't know if you can see the little lizard in the picture above. Emma took this picture and it turned out better than the ones I took. This lizard is their brand new pet ... as of today! They haven't named it yet but they are going to work on thinking one up this weekend.

Grandpa Jones and Matthew were outside as the sun was setting and Matthew kept pointing out "pretty clouds" for grandpa to take pictures of. Grandpa promised that we would post one of these pretty cloud pictures so that he could see it on the computer.

Little Sienna joined us for story time tonight. We read the book I bought for Emma's birthday. It is called, "Emma's Magic Winter" and it's just a cute story about making friends and school and family. We had a good time reading together ... and then it was time to get everyone tucked in bed. I am giving thanks to the Lord tonight for such a nice day.