Ending at the Beginning

Once again my computer is dictating how many pictures it will take. I wanted to post the picture of the kids on the day they picked me up at the airport, 'cause as my title suggests, I am showing what we did during the first few days of my arriving in Tucson.
Josh has a great smile in this first swimming picture. The next day, he and Claire were playing with a ball they named "Sarella" when he fell down in the kid pool and went underwater. Hurray for him, he kept his mouth shut as he tried unsuccessfully two times to stand up and just fell down again. By the time he was under for the third time, I rescued him. He was scared; he didn't cry and after a short warming up period, he was ready to get back in the bigger, warmer pool and didn't want to leave when it was time to go back to the room. Nevertheless, he is obsessing on the experience and talks nearly everyday about his going under the water and that he doesn't want to do it again.

Emilia was very shy about having her picture taken in the dress I made for her. Clair was a poseur. They got lots of compliments on their dresses at church, which of course made me feel really happy. I will be making a dress for Isabel as soon as I get home.

Here is Charity is her work uniform. She is advancing the the ranks of servers at Olive Garden rapidly enough to be making her co-workers jealous. She already has received blue card priviledges and now has been asked to be a certified trainer. Last night, she treated the entire family to dinner. It was yummy and the kids (bribed to the hilt) were very well behaved.

Here, the kids are coloring at the hotel. Notice how Josh has his crayons perfectly aligned. He has to set things up according to some template in his head before he can begin to color. He is so methodical and organized and obviously intelligent it is sometimes scary. That is until suddenly, he becomes a three year old and starts throwing every crayon in the box.
Emilia has her own little obsession. She always has to be carrying a "wipe."
If she were allowed, she would go through a jumbo pack of wipes in a day. Sometimes she's content with just the wipe, but often she gets her spray bottle of no more tangles type spray and cleans all the furniture in the house. Too bad she doesn't apply her cleaning obsession to the floor. She recognizes when she is about to "poop" and since she abhors wearing a messy diaper, she takes her diaper off and does her duty on the floor. Jaren and Charity so nicely refer to this habit as her "dropping a dud" so when Johnny and Crystal sent Halloween candy which included Milk Duds, Joshua, upon hearing their name, and seeing them in their somewhat melted together state, refused to eat them.

Since Josh did not get a new homemade dress when I came, I made him this "drive on" blanket. The kids seem to have fun with it.

Claire has decided that she is not a child anymore. She told me that she tries to act like an adult. This conversation was part of her telling me how to drive. When I suggested that I didn't need a child to tell me how to drive, she reminded me (she remembered?!) of my first visit here, when I made a mistake and the policeman stopped me. Thus her justification for careful guidance every time I drive. That and the fact that she is not (NOT) a child.
She is very excited about her upcoming trip to Idaho. I hope the snow she wants is there.
It's hard to imagine snow as I sweat in the 90+ degree weather. I found it a strange phenomenon, that here in the desert, an ice cream truck goes by their house several times a day. Charity said something to the effect that ice cream is so enjoyable because of the heat. True, but as I revive all my memories of deserts seen in movies and on TV with the proverbial cattle skull lying in the arid wind-swept landscape, never once did an ice cream truck appear. And if those two concepts are not difficult enough to reconcile, yesterday as it went by, it was playing Christmas carols.

Where did it go

The ride to this beautiful spot covers the kids favorite stretch of road. It is a fair representation of a roller coaster--they call it biggy hills. Jaren exceeds the speed limit slightly and the car and stomaches are air-borne for a period of time. Claire said it best--she said it made her bottom feel like a ghost.
Then the sights at the top create another breathlessness.

I just rechecked today's post and discovered this pic had somehow been cut against my wishes. (Somewhat like Sabrina's cut from Dancing. I hate it when inferiors do my thinking for me.) Double click on this view. I can't even say anything about the views up there. My descriptors get lost in the cragginess.

Tucson Activities

We actually have been having a lot of fun even though my post about the trip to Mexico wouldn't be evidence of that. Apparently there is a limit to the number of pictures one can load in one post or else my computer is just tired of transferring because I don't seem to be able to get any more on here.
One day after dropping Jaren off at the poetry center, I took the kids to a park on Speedway and though many homeless men and women--some drunks, some drug users--regularly inhabit the park, we were able to carve out our own space; the kids had a wonderful time totally unaware of another lifestyle playing its pitiful scenes nearby. There were some other children playing and the interaction was sweet.
It has taken many visits to get Emilia to accept me. The picture of her shows her in a little private game she was playing. She would climb on the toy and then take off in a run, face alight, into my waiting arms where she would give me a cuddle before returning to the toy. She repeated this routine about twenty times.
No one was there to record the expression on my face.

Yesterday, the family had a surprise planned for me. We went for a short drive up in the mountains--actually to the Tucson Mountain Park where the views were spectacular. More than spectacular really. One needs to double click on the pics in order to really appreciate the rugged beauty where we ate a picnic lunch before going to church.

I obviously have not mastered the placing of pictures in this post.
Jaren just received a new calling last week. I'll leave it to him to share that or not. I feel priviledge to have been here when he was set apart and to hear both him and Charity bear their testimonies.
I will have to write another post to see if I can get the other pictures I want.

A Comedy of Some Sort

Ever since I got here, we'd planned to go to Nogales on Friday. I wanted to go for mostly sentimental reasons. Years ago, when Johnny was an architectural student, his department went on a field trip to Phoenix predominantly to visit the Paulo Soleri sites of Arcosanti and Cosanti. While in Arizona, they slipped over the border to Nogales. Though Johnny expressed distaste for most of the Mexican part of the trip, he brought me home a wonderful pair of exotic looking leather sandals which I wore for years. Later, when he graduated, we tripped to Disneyland and home through Phoenix and again bought sandals for me in Nogales. It was that experience I was hoping to duplicate.
We got off to an interesting start. Jaren needed to deliver materials to the local public library which we couldn't find. We abandoned that task and started on the next, delivering their rent check to their housing management unit. It was miles across town from where we had been searching for the library. Jaren thought it was at 2720 Prince and Charity said she had been there before and knew it was on Ina. So we went to Ina. (I once knew a woman named Ina. She was the mother of a friend and the wife of a man who would buy our mud pies for 5 cents apiece. He purportedly ate them though he'd never let us watch.) Charity admits that she's not good with numbers so she did not know an address on Ina. What she knew is that the building we were looking for was by "where they build up a wall to hold stuff back." In other words, a retaining wall. Ina is miles and miles long. How long did it take us to drive up and down Ina looking for a retaining wall? Finally Jaren and I got out of the van at a Fry's Food to buy deli sandwiches and chocolate candy bars. Charity continued the search for the retaining wall. We bought the food we needed and Charity found the housing management.
At last we were on our way to Mexico.


If somehow I'd forgotten what the experience is like of being constantly harangued by vendors, I've never had the occasion to experience it with three screaming, hyper children determined not to listen or to obey anything the adults were saying. While we were in Tucson, Jaren showed me a business named "Ugly, but honest." One of the last places we visited in the bizarre bazaar was a booth where a man was calling out "Cheap American junk!" The only honesty we heard. By that time, Claire had held my hand long enough to earn a bobble head. So we bought three of them for two dollars. Charity was disappointed that Jaren and I gave up the battle so easily. She needed some time without children to do the shopping she wanted to do.

We walked back to the parking lot on the American side where we'd parked the car and drove across the border. Jaren and I were both much more interested in seeing the countryside than in being accosted by thieves and beggars and men trying to pick up Emilia and stroke Claire's golden hair.

Claire thought she'd like to live in the neighborhoods we were driving through and was quite upset that we wouldn't let her play with the children and try out her few Spanish phrases.

Charity did get some private shopping time while the kids slept in the car with Jaren. She also got to shop once again while we spent an hour inching our way through the queue of cars entering the good US of A.
It requires a non-enviable ability to divorce oneself from natural feelings of compassion and empathy to see such extreme poverty and filth and then drive away eating a chocolate bar.
Jaren and I went to see King of California--a delightful movie.

The Sonoran Hot Dog

I can think of several analogies that describe the phenomena of anticipation--long waiting--desire--hope--expectancy. I have been waiting for a sonoran hot dog since I was in Tucson with the Watsons when they moved at the end of July. Their friend, Josh, described this delectable hot dog--doesn't that sound like an oxymoron? For some reason unknown to me, we never fed me one while I was here, though Jaren had one. So, I've waited. Then Gillz comes for just one weekend and teases us, taunts us, with her picture of the sonoran hot dog. So, I've been waiting and anticipating. Seeing her picture, both Jen and Jimmy have drooled. Finally, last night, my time came. Was it as good as desired?

What do you think? What do you think? This hot dog is wrapped in bacon, smothered with beans, cheese, tomatoes, onions, mustard and mayo and served in a really soft, freshly-baked roll. Charity thinks the roll is like a potato roll. I detected a slight amount of heat that gently initiates the palate for what is to come. Please know that I prefer to ease into my food; I'm the one who takes 10 minutes to eat a fine chocolate because I want the flavors and textures to caress my tongue and taste buds before swallowing. So my first taste was just a nibble of the bun; just a tantalizing nibble.

Baby Emilia was fussy on the ride to El Guero Canelo so we debated whether we would eat in the car or go inside. To my delight, out was in. The eatery is an open air establishment and though we were sitting in the car, we were still a part of the environment. An open window afforded us access to the sounds and smells as though we were seated at one of the picnic tables.

As you can see, a roasted chile that none of us gringos can identify is served with the dog. You can also see that none of us ate them. Jaren explained there is a Spanish word that means "overcome with chiles." Thus, a quasi salad bar provides fresh cucumber to cleanse and soothe the palate.
So was it everything I'd hoped for. As with most anticipated events, it was different than I had imagined. I'm not a fan of heat so intense it overpowers the flavor. This dog growled subtly and then bit, but more a playful bite than a flesh-ripping tear. I could identify the meat, the beans, the cheese, the onions, the mustard, the smooth mayo. I could taste them individually and in total. It was moist; it was succulent; it was warm; it was more than the sum of its parts--synergistic. It made my taste buds pop. It slopped out of its bun to provide some entertaining licking. It was supreme.
Oh, sonoran; oh, somoran.

Look What It Did Today

Olivia and Lincoln had just arrived at my house when we heard a crash that sounded as if the house were splitting. Immediately following, we could hear the prancing and pawing of millions of hoofs. No, many Santas hadn't landed--we were being hammered by a wild hail storm.

My metal roof magnifies every sound; it can be quite frightening to someone who is not used to its aural theatrics. We rushed to the window wall in the big room to gape at the storm raging outside. Though daylight, the lightening flashes were increasing the intensity of the light outside followed closely by booming thunder.

I took the pictures right away, but couldn't make this post because the storm knocked out the cable internet in this area. Jennica called and told me not to let her kids go home because of the danger of the lightning. We were held captive by the storm for about twenty minutes. When it quit hailing, it snowed. About an hour later, the sky was blue and everything on the ground melted. All the cliches about Idaho's weather are true. I love Idaho but am really looking forward to my trip to Tucson and the sun and a Sonoran hot dog next week. Unfortunately, when I come home and get back into my thermal underwear, no one will notice my tan. They may notice the aftermath of several Sonoran hot dogs.

A Piece of Time

Nearly four years ago, I started these quilts. They were supposed to be baby quilts for Isabel and Claire. They have been hanging on my design wall for more than three years waiting for their final borders. Finally after my 60th birthday and my being able to reduce my hours at work, I have finished them both. The one on the top is for Isabel. The bottom one is for Claire. The girls are both four years old now.

Isabel will get hers tonight. Claire will get hers when I go to Tucson on the 27th. I am so excited to have these done and be able to give them to the girls. I love making quilts. It runs second place to my true love--my grandchildren. (My own children figure in here someplace, but it seems easier to show love to the little ones. At least they'll slow down and let me love them.)

My quilting has changed since my first attempts for Whitney and Morgan. Cierra's and Baylee's were a little more advanced. In fact, it was when I walked into a quilt store in Encinitas, Ca. looking for thread to finish the borders on Baylee's quilt, that I first discovered quilting/piecing as I now know it. Olivia, Lincoln and Kelton all have art quilts. Baby Josh, Ty, and Emilia all got "minky" quilts because there was not time to design blocks when they were born. Minky is one of the softest materials in the entire world. And there are some perks to having the children verbal when they get their quilts. Ty said his quilt made him "so happy." Jen said Ty had never used those words before.

Though these quilts are not going to newborns, I feel newly born. It is more wonderful than I can describe to get back a piece of my life as I once knew it. Working on a quilt for someone you love is a way to hold them mentally until the quilt can hold them physically.

Congratulations Dr. Watson

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAREN

Your memory lane is getting longer.

Have a happy 31st.

I love you.

"Oh, What a Beautiful Morning"

Jennica called and woke me up this morning saying "Look outside."

I knew what to expect yet it still gave me a goose-bump rush. Palisades reservoir is at 1.8% capacity. We went into last winter with the level in the 40% and still ran out of pumping water for farmers. So, this is a wonderful blessing. Anyone out there who has spare room and words in their prayer time or who is willing to make it a priority, please remember to pray for snow for our area.

Last week when we received a skiff of snow, I was talking to Claire and after my telling her it was snowing here, she said, "Snow? Is it Christmas?" Her memories of two snow years have obviously melted in the warm climates of Louisville and Tucson. Josh and Emilia probably never had any memories. So, babies, this is what it looks like at Grandma's this morning.

I can hear the chilly squeals of Jen's children (except Lincoln, he's duck hunting) out my back windows as they go for the season's first snow man.

Last night, Cierra and I had a dinner, movie, and sleepover. It was comforting listening to her soft breath sounds and feeling her wiggle for more warmth as I lay awake during the post midnight hours. I was reading "The Winter of our Discontent." Here's praying for contentment for all my family and blogger friends. It's getting off to a good start.