Welcome help from our visitors.

After breakfast Monday, we all changed into old clothes and began painting the spindles on our porch rails.  The kids worked on the deck while Grandma and Grandpa worked on the front porch.  We had thought it would be raining again, but it did not rain all day.  We had the usual drips of white on the wood floors but removed by lightly sanding them.  Stephen did that because he is closer to the ground.  We had a large lunch and then relaxed in the afternoon.  Elizabeth had wanted to play hand and foot with the Tollefson’s, so we invited them for popcorn at 6.  We played 3 hands before they had to leave because Linda gets up at 4:30 each morning.  The strange thing is that we let Elizabeth and Stephen be partners.  I can’t understand how anyone partnered with Stephen wins.  They beat everyone else by 5,000 points.  We tried to retire early because we wanted to drive to Lexington but not too early.

We were up just after 8 Tuesday.  The kids had packed most of their items last night, so we had part of the car loaded.  Elizabeth wanted to do something fun before we left, so 3 of us walked up the mountain to the end of the pavement.  We then left for our drive.  We learned later that the kids had forgotten only one thing—Elizabeth’s painted cap.  On the way through Knoxville, we made a stop at the Russell Stover outlet and bought some candy for us and them.  We had breakfast in Newport but didn’t eat any lunch until we had checked into our motel, picked up Andrew for a swim, and headed for a Meijer so he could get some food for his siblings.  We had hamburgers at a local store.  We took them to where Andrew is housesitting and, after his working on my computer a bit, we left them and went to the motel to sleep.  We will miss the children’s being with us.  They are especially loving and genuinely enjoy being with us.  We got a good night’s sleep.