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.