My Faith and Joy… and Boys!

OK, I’m finally getting my pictures organized!  Here are the photos from our trip to Bearizona, near the Grand Canyon.  After getting to ride through an amazing zoo in our car and come within feet of bears, wolves, and other wildlife, we walked through a bunch of other animal exhibits and even got to take part in a raptor show – Becky was up on stage with a beautiful owl (blindfolded to see if she could detect the owl’s flight using only her sense of hearing)!

I’m still here!  Our evenings have been so packed lately that I still haven’t had time to properly choose photos from our trip for the blog.  But at least here’s one of the big girls at Bearzona near the Grand Canyon in AZ!

I took this picture as a reminder to document how much fun I have watching Tazie do puzzles – she’s amazing!  She rotates the pieces properly, doesn’t get frustrated when they don’t fit on her first attempt, and they really hold her attention well.  I’m so proud of her!

It warms my heart to see my men working out in the cold!  Just glad it’s not me, ha!

We had some face paint from Halloween that we never used (we had aspirations of turning Becky’s face into a black-and-white panda, but my execution wasn’t quite what either of us had hoped for, so we scrubbed that idea – literally!).  The kids were yearning to do SOMETHING with the leftover paint, so they decided to decorate themselves.  I’ll say here that while I knew this activity was happening, I was not overseeing it in any way (my bad!), so I can’t take credit for the results!  Without further ado, here’s the documentation of what happens when you let four kids go to town on their faces with paint!

Now what I failed to anticipate was how difficult it would be to remove the paint.  So after these pictures were taken, we started washing and washing, with only a smearing-effect.  To make matters worse, we were in a time crunch because Jim was taking the big kids to a Gospel meeting that night, and I needed them to not look like hooligans!  So I ended up throwing all the kids in the bath and shower and we just kept using more and more soap until they were all more or less recognizable again.  Although I do think it still looked like Jimmy had blue eyeliner on when he went to church that night, ack!!  Guess I learned my lesson to supervisor all further body-painting endeavors and make sure we’re using very washable paint!