March 25 My quarantined Kaity-Girl

Thursday:  First of all, let me start by saying that I absolutely LOVE these pictures of Kaity! LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. 

Kaity's entire class was sent home from school Tuesday because evidently one of the children in her class presented "sick" and, out of the abundance of caution (!!), everyone was sent home and told to quarantine until NEXT Tuesday. Jesse let me know this right away so that I could cancel Kaity's Thursday evening swim lesson. I felt so sad for Kaity. She would have to remain at Diana's for the next 7 days and she would not be able to come over here at all.

I was mulling all of that over on Wednesday, and then I believe the Lord reminded me of my friend Brenda and all of the outside stuff she does with her grandsons, even though she wears a mask, etc.

So I arranged with Diana to come over to their house and play outside with Kaity late Thursday afternoon and into the evening. We had so much fun. And it was SO GOOD to still see Kaity, even though it wasn't at my house. We started by playing a rock throwing game. We used chalk and drew a huge square on her driveway and divided into four sections. We put the number 10, 5, 2 and 1 in each "box" and then we tossed our rock to see how many points we could get. We actually played this for 20 minutes!

THEN I got out our soccer ball and we kicked that around her giant back yard for quite awhile ...

But THEN Kaity asked if she could bring THE DOG outside to play with us. The DOG is huge and I do not do well with dogs in general ... mostly because I didn't grow up around them and I don't like being LICKED or jumped on ... or worse yet ... barked at. 

Meet ELBIS. Yes, that appears to be his name. At first, I thought everyone was calling him ELVIS, which would make better sense to me--but clearly, they call this dog ELBIS. Kaity thought that if we played ball with him for awhile, I would get used to him and he would get used to me (instead of barking his head off whenever he sees me). Kaity was completely RIGHT too -- playing with Elby worked out just fine.

Kaity loves this dog so much. And clearly, he loves her.

Playing soccer with a dog outside doesn't work so well, however. We ended up just kicking the ball between us and Elby ... he intercepted every kick, no matter how hard we kicked or how crooked we aimed ... this dog was amazing.

We also took a little jaunt up into Kaity's woods where I saw my FIRST BUDS of spring. YAY!

Look at dear Kaity. Isn't she something? I love her so much.

This picture looks like it was taken somewhere in the hills of Virginia ...

Kaity went back and grabbed the leash for Elby and he went with us on our woods adventure ...

We climbed up a pretty steep hill all the way to the top where you can see I-96 down below ...

We walked back to Kaity's house where she finally tried on the boots I had purchased for her two weeks ago and was keeping in my car--just in case, I had kept the receipt--but they fit her perfectly. We're just going to keep these boots in my car for muddy days when we want to walk in the woods and not wreck Kaity's tennis shoes.

I was remarking about how great this tree would be to climb and up bounded Kaity like a tree monkey ...

This tree is in their side yard ... it is perfect for climbing. Kaity said she had never been this high in the tree before!

It was so much fun watching her climb, seeing her wonderful smile, and just being with her today. Thank you so much, Lord, for this little girl. Help me to love her as You love her!