Crazy, Mixed-up Vacation (Cont'd)

The rest of the story. (Yep, this is going to be TMI [too much information] for most everybody, but hey, this isn't required reading! lol If you prefer not to read the entire post, at least don't miss our story about Elisha. It's at the beginning of the post.)

Sunday evening we visited with Rose (niece) & Fanie and family. Abigail is Daddy’s girl.

When we visit, we try to bring little goodies for the children. This time we gave each of the girls a little puzzle game (the object is to get two tiny balls in a certain spot in a maze). You can see Liliva concentrating on her game—she mastered it! For the boys, we brought each one a “sticky foot.” Too bad we didn’t have sticky feet for the girls too—they were a big hit! Kezia is experimenting with stretching the “string” attached to a sticky foot.

Daniel’s sticky foot boomeranged and hooked around his ear!

The boys were nice enough to share their sticky feet with the girls. Liliva wasn’t quite sure what to think of such a peculiar toy, but she got the hang of it.

Elisha certainly got into the swing of things with his sticky foot.

His foot dropped off the ceiling and splatted right on his face! “Take a picture!” he laughed. Gladly!

Uh oh! Elisha accidentally let go of the “string” on his sticky foot and it stayed on the ceiling. “Uncle Ken, will you get it for me?” Sure.

Elisha got a kick out of the foot sticking on the ceiling… and looking at Uncle Ken so pitifully that Uncle Ken would get up and retrieve the foot. Again. And again. And again. Finally Uncle Ken told him, “If you let go of the string again and your foot sticks up there, you will have to wait a while for me to get it. I can’t keep getting up and down to pull your foot down.”

Elisha winged the foot to the ceiling… to the floor… to the ceiling… to the floor… to the ceiling. Uh oh! There was that irresistibly pitiful look again. Uncle Ken sympathetically reminded him he would have to wait a while. After the group of us had continued our conversation for several minutes, Elisha came and stood in front of Ken, put an arm on each of Ken’s legs, looked imploringly into Ken’s eyes and said, “Grandpa, will you get my foot?”

We laughed so hard!! I guess as long as Ken was getting up and down, he was Uncle Ken. Once he got too old for that, he was Grandpa! Once we regained our composure, Kezia and Elisha tried to pull Grampa up from the couch so he could get the foot off the ceiling.

Our little buddy, Elisha. Every time we are with him he gives us so many laughs!

Quiet, sweet Liliva. Lotsa love wrapped up in this little gal!

We also gave the kids a story mat. I forget the name of the company that makes it, but it is for Bible stories and the company also makes action figures to go with the mat. I happened to see the mat on a clearance shelf at Wal-Mart… sans action figures. I figured they could still have fun telling stories with it. They weren’t quite sure about that, so Ken demonstrated by telling of the boy with the lunch of loaves and fishes. That was all they needed to get started!

Abigail is quite the young artist! She started drawing and cutting out Jesus, the disciples, the lunch, the baskets of leftovers… soon she was retelling the story. Before long, she had drawn and cut out an impressive outlay of figures and accessories for a number of stories.

While we were eating a snack, Rose was explaining to the children that I am Grandma Becky's sister. Abigail had only pondered that for several seconds when you could see that a light had turned on in her head. Glowing, she announced, "Well then you are Grandma Faith!"

As the children were settling down, the adults started into serious conversation, sharing our hearts with each other about a number of things. Who knew time could fly by so fast?! One by one the kiddos curled up and went to sleep. (They didn’t want to miss anything by going to bed.) We knew it was getting late and we were staying too long even though we only get to talk like this about once a year, but we were still surprised when Fanie said, “I need to leave for work in about five minutes!” Yikes! We had talked until almost 4:30 AM. (I think they have forgiven us for a sleepless night.)

A few minutes after Fanie left, we said our goodbyes to Rose and left to return to Tim’s.

Before we had traveled very far, Ken mentioned that he wasn’t feeling so good and needed a pit stop. Thankfully Denny’s is open 24 hours! We still have no idea why Montezuma was seeking revenge against Ken… but wow, did he ever attack. Ken was very sick all through Monday. Tab called asking if we wanted her to buy us a couple whoopie pies—you betcha!!—but Ken was too sick to eat his (he couldn’t keep down anything he ate). You know you’re really suffering when you’re too sick to eat a whoopie pie!

Andy offered to share his cable internet service with me, for which I was grateful. Several projects had been left in limbo when I had closed up shop on Friday, so I had told the clients that I was going to be on vacation but that I would complete the work and email it to them. They were gracious and said that they could wait until I returned from vacation, but I really wanted to have these jobs behind me when I got back home because other jobs would be waiting then.

Technology is great when it works. No matter what I did, I could only download about half of my emails and couldn’t send anything. I tried several more times throughout the week to no avail and finally gave up (for more than one reason).

Happily Ken improved as the day progressed Tuesday. We decided he had been perhaps too tired or overstressed or something since he hadn’t eaten anything different from the rest of us.

Tuesday evening found most of the gang at Andy & Joy’s for some family time together. Ken and Tony, and later Tim Jr and Tab too enjoyed playing several games of Carroms. Talk about entertaining. Oh, my! Andy got in the mix too sometime. (I think he took Tim Jr’s place after Tim went home.)

Ken ready for action! You can tell what Tony thinks is going to happen.

Kristan is Grandpa Andy’s flying angel. He taught Kristan how to “fly” when she was just a little thing and she can still fly high!

Joy (she and Becky’s Rhoda are the flutists in the family) purchased a small pan flute some time ago and brought it out Friday evening. I bought one very similar to this one several years ago from the Ecuadorians who were playing during the “Festival of Nations” at Dollywood. On the way home in the car, I toyed with it, trying to play “Jesus Loves Me.” I thought I had managed a fair-to-middlin’ job for an amateur, so I grinned at Ken and said, “Not bad, huh?” To which he replied, “Were you playing a song?!” * sigh *

Joy toyed with it for a while, and we actually recognized what she was playing: Jesus Loves Me!

Alicia wanted to play in the worst way, but it wasn’t happening.

I knew we were staying too long again when Mrs. Claus (Alicia) made an appearance in the kitchen! (The kids were playing with a box of dress-up clothes.)

Grandma Joy loves being with her little ladies, Kristan and Ashley.

Wednesday Ken was back on his feet and finally able to eat his whoopie pie! Happy day!

Also we were able to stick to our plan to hear Tabitha speak at the Sunbury God’s Missionary Church about the mission work in which she is involved in South Africa. We let Tab drive our car to the meeting for old time’s sake. (She had been with us when we test drove Pete all those years ago. We didn’t have anyone to test the back seat when we test drove Repeat! She also drove for us several times back when we traveled from TN to PA and back together.)

Here’s Tab and Abigail standing by Tab’s missions display. Somewhere I have a picture of Tab and Abigail from when Rose & Fanie visited us in TN when Abigail was just a wee thing, but I couldn’t put my hands on it tonight! : (

We really enjoyed hearing all she had to say about the mission, school, hostel, South African culture and what God is doing there and how He is using her to be blessed and be a blessing there. Near the end of the meeting, she particularly focused on the various languages spoken among the children at the school and demonstrated various sounds from two or three of the languages. She steered clear, however, of Afrikaans. That was because Rose & Fanie and family attended the meeting too! Tab admitted that she was a little nervous speaking about South Africa, its culture and languages with a South African sitting in the audience, but Fanie said she did a very good job. : )

I love this line-up: Rose, Kezia Faith, Liliva, Daniel, Kihannah, Abigail, Fanie and Elisha! : )

Another version of the line-up—okay, crooked line-up.

Check out this line-up: Tabitha brought these glasses to us as souvenirs. The glasses feature the “Big Five”: rhino, water buffalo, cheetah, elephant, and lion.

I thought I was going to elude Montezuma, but throughout the day Wednesday I had a hunch he was stalking me. By the time service was over, I wasn’t feeling so well, but we had two stops we really wanted to make. First was the house Tim Jr & Amy bought and are remodeling. (The word remodeling certainly doesn’t do justice to what they are actually doing to the house!) I had no idea Tim Jr was so widely talented!! He’s not just about computers and music. What an awesome deck he designed and built! What a beautiful kitchen is in the making! (They were able to purchase a $400 dishwasher for only $150—that inspired me to get watching our local Lowe’s/Home Depot/HH Gregg. Ours has never worked properly. It’s just a big drying rack with a door. Guess what’s on my birthday list!) What a superbly nice house they are going to have when they are finally finished!

From there we went to Wal-Mart where Tim Jr helped us select a wireless router and we looked for several things Tab still needed to find before she returned to South Africa. Then we dropped Tim Jr off at his house, drove around Penn View campus to see several projects in progress (it was close to midnight by this time, so we didn’t see much!), and dropped Tab off at Andy & Joy’s house (where she was staying so we could have a bed). By the time Ken & I reached Tim’s, we were both feeling pretty sick. Perhaps I should rephrase that. It wasn’t pretty!

Most of the day Thursday we barely moved. So much for the visiting we had hoped to do with some friends who live in Penns Creek and others who were in town for annual conference. We did manage to reach the front porch and sit on the glider and swing. That was somewhat relaxing although it brought back memories of Ken saying, “Why don’t we just move 1000 miles away and start all over?!” * shudder * (We moved to TN after that statement eleven years ago.)

By Friday, we were improving. I called Shrawder’s to order ham and cheese subs—something we always look forward to when we are in Penns Creek—for our lunch (to go along with a bag of Martin’s Kettle Cooked Chips). Yum! The girl who answered the phone had no idea what I was talking about, and, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of the word hoagies! Have I been out of PA so long?

We had so hoped to attend Penns Creek camp meeting for the one evening service we could, but we didn’t think we should venture too far away from the house yet. Friday evening the whole gang of us met at Andy’s again for another family time. More Carroms, more dress-up for the kids, more just enjoying talking, playing and being together. Tim Jr set up our wireless router so it would be ready to go (hopefully!) when we got home.

Saturday we packed up, left Tim’s about 1:30 and headed to Andy’s to complete the last of the sewing projects Joy had been working on for me and to say our goodbyes to them. Joy wasn’t feeling well, but, bless her heart, she kept sewing until the job was done since we were leaving that day.

We stopped at the IGA in Middleburg to pick up several packages of fresh sausage (sausage isn’t the same when you leave PA—understatement!) and several whoopie pies (unheard of in TN). The real ones were gone. We had to settle for the chocolate with peanut butter and banana with vanilla variations.

We didn’t hit the road early enough to travel much in daylight. Ken is always happy to see this sign, although this time he expressed feeling a little confusion since MD hasn’t been his home now for 11 years and his parents moved from MD to SC last year.

The picture we took of the welcome to WV was just a blur of reflectors and lights.

Once we hit VA, the trip seems never ending! We stayed in VA overnight and didn’t check out of the motel until the check-out deadline. I finally downloaded the rest of my emails!

Was this ever a welcome sign to see! Only 2 more hours to go.

We arrived home about 7 PM. Since the temp and humidity was still miserable and Ken was starting to feel not good again, we waited until later to unload. I connected the wireless router and booted up... it works!!! Thank you, Tim Jr! :)

Ken pushed himself to go to work Monday, but crashed when he came home at the end of the day. On Tuesday his supervisor sent him home at noon. Basically, he dragged himself through the rest of the week. (Yes, the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug! Funny, but I have had several former students tell me that when they hear people use drug as the past tense, they remember us talking about that in class and correct it, at least mentally [as well as sneaked being the past tense of sneak, not snuck]. Heh, small wonder! How many times did they hear me rant about drug and snuck?! Sadly, dictionaries are actually including—next step is accepting—these substandard words.)

Whew, we are actually glad vacation and recuperation is over! The normal routine sounds pretty good right now. : )