When Joshua Comes to Town

WELL!! * Italics written by Linda Lee

Briana and I decided to take a trip to Linda Lee and Ben's house in Casper, WY. It was quite the fun adventure. We arrived in Casper late Friday night, having left that afternoon. Linda Lee had a room set up for Briana (Lydia kindly donated hers), and a nice air mattress for me. 

Saturday morning I woke up to the sound of the kids playing. I thought about trying to sleep a little bit longer, but I knew that those kids needed to be played with. :) We read a couple of books, and then we ate a delicious breakfast of German pancakes. After breakfast, we were trying to decide to go on a hike, go swimming, or go frisbee golfing... we dilly-dallied a bit in our decision, playing croquet in the back yard and then painting our faces with some colored rocks that I had picked up in Brazil; the same rocks that we used to paint our faces when we were down there.

Anna wanted to be a "Snow Princess", Lydia chose the "Swirly Fairy", and Eli picked out a Dragon/Snake of some sort. We adapted the colors and ended up using paintbrushes to add in the detail. It was definitely a highlight! Linda Lee joined in to paint Eli's face.

Here you can see my palette of colors on the side walk. We used the hose to get the right consistency of wet/dry. 

Briana and I painted each other's faces at the end. It was really a test to see how well we could do each other's makeup.... ha!

Sorry we didn't get any of the finished products! I guess we'll never know whether or not I would be a good makeup artist.

In case you missed it, We picked swimming at a local reservoir for our activity! We played in the water, made sand castles and we found a few merpeople on the beach... A merman named Eli Horsefish (Snake fish) , a mermaid named Lydia Fairyfish, and a couple of mermaid sisters Briana and Anna.  

Emmett had fun! He was sad when he was left in the stroller while we all played. He got some good sun, but fortunately, he was saved from sunburn. He loved splashing in the water.

We took some time to have lunch... some if not all of us had a little extra seasoning (sand) sprinkled in our food. We didn't want to just experience the outdoors, we wanted to partake of it! Later Briana told us that Eli had rubbed sand on his chest and said, "Look I got hair on my chest!" And Lydia said, "No Eli, to get hair on your chest you have to eat all you vegetables!"

Here are the mermaid sisters... I'll let Linda Lee tell the story.When Briana mentioned that Anna and her were sisters, Anna loving reached out her hand to Briana in the cutest way, so they could hold hands  Anna and Lydia also enjoyed extra tail decorating by Briana with some berry like plant on the beach.

 

If you look closely, you'll notice that we still have spots of face paint from earlier that morning.

Later that evening we had a fancy meal of tacos with corn on the cob, watermelon, etc. Briana, Linda Lee, Ben, and I played some Uno Attack. It was a game of sudden reverses, mountains of cards, vicious tactics, and family bonding... kind of like any time we play cards as a family. :) Haha. Actually it was just play as many times as we could until Joshua won.  but I m not sure that ever happened.  If we want to get vicious we should have played beat your neighbor.  We also had a few fireworks on that Saturday night. 

We had a good day Sunday. I showed off my full set of pictures from Brazil, we enjoyed some leftovers from Saturday plus some tasty cookies and homemade ice cream. 

Briana and I stopped by Independence Rock on our way home, and we thought about stopping in Martin's Cove, but decided to press forward toward Zion since the time was far spent.

Briana said that at first she was a little nervous about meeting Linda Lee, but she soon found that there was no reason to worry. She said that she loved meeting more of my family and that she enjoys seeing who I am when I am around the family. Briana is amazing and genuine.  She was super awesome with all of us.  The kids woke her up early and the just loved being around her. She radiated love for the gospel and for the family and for Christ.  She truly has a great  Charity about her. She has  a love for the little things in life. She reminded me of how we can be happy no matter what and that we should let ourselves be happy.  Kind of reminded me of that Berezay contagious love. 

Thank you to the Dalton family for being such wonderful hosts!