FALL TEXAS TRIP: Day 3

We've arrived in El Paso! After a beautiful drive all through New Mexico today, we drove up in front of Jes and Di's new digs at about 3:00 this afternoon. The children were not home yet from school, so Jesse took us over to the base to check in at the Lodge. We were thankfully able to get a nice room here ... at least through Wednesday. We are on a waiting list for the following two days, so we'll have to see if we can remain on base or have to check into a hotel off base for the last two days we are here.

I've tried to pick out just a few pictures to show you tonight of the children ... as usual, I didn't take one single picture of Jes or Di ... yikes! I'll try to make up for that tomorrow. It was Emma's birthday two weeks ago, so instead of mailing her presents to her and NOT getting to watch her open them, we just brought them with us, even though it meant we were LATE giving them to her. She didn't seem to mind at all! Plus, Diana saved Grandpa and Grandma Hand's gifts for Emma to open today as well.

This is a drawing kit that I purchased for Emma at the John Ball Zoo Gift shop last week. It has step-by-step instructions on how to draw a bunch of cute zoo animals and came with colored pencils and nice drawing paper too.

Here is Emma after she opened up her Rainbow Stunt Streamers (I got this at the Meijer Garden Gift shop last week) ... she was excited to go outside and see what they could do ...

Emma was very delighted with the patterns you could spin and twirl around in the air ...

This is Matthew. He was five in April. He was a little bit sad that it wasn't HIS birthday. But I had brought cool motorcycle toys for he and Christopher to kind of ease their pain ... I forgot to take a picture of those toys, however ...

Grandma and Grandpa Hand gave Emma a bunch of beautiful gifts ... great PJ's (beautiful!), some pretty shirts, socks, a great paint set, and this very nice set of paint brush PENS. Emma was really pleased!

These are some gel-stickers for windows ... pretty birds ...

Emma decorated several of the windows of her new house with them ...

We played outside for a little while before dinner tonight. Several neighborhood children joined us ... nice kids, all of them. We met Gabriel (sitting down in the blue shirt), Matthew (the boy in the black shirt), and his two sisters: Nakyla and Yuna.

Emma was anxious to show me the very nice game box her folks had bought for her. NOW we can play Princess Checkers! There are little crowns to put on each princess who makes it to the back row ... very cute.

We made a bunch of paper airplanes and launched them, as well as playing with our parachute guys. It was a little too windy this afternoon ... so both parachutes ended up on the roof, as well as a few of the airplanes. We're hoping the wind does us a favor and blows the parachutes back down over night!

This is another picture of Emma decorating the windows with her gel stickers.

This is a nice picture of Chris taken by Grandpa Jones ... who inadvertantly cut the top of his head out of the picture ... that's OK, though ... it's still a nice picture.

Diana made a delicious spaghetti dinner for us tonight. Here is Matthew finishing off his drink.

We had a bedtime story tonight. I did a repeat just to see how much of it the children had remembered from the last time I was here! We read again about Zaccheus ... and they remembered lots of the details of this great story. And then Emma asked if she could read us just a short story ... so she did! She read about the little sick girl that Jesus healed.

This picture is for you, Grandma Hand! I asked the boys to smile real BIG and say "I love you, Grandma Hand!" and this is what I got ...

I'm looking forward to a really nice few days here in El Paso. It's the holiday weekend. Jesse has some extra time off. So we're going to spend it together. I'll try to show you some pictures of their new house in days to come ... it is much nicer than the one they had been living in since moving to Ft. Bliss. And can you believe it? We actually had good internet access tonight with successful photo uploads! Wow. I'm impressed!