Trent's trip...

Last week Trent took his first all alone by hiself vacation trip to Idaho to see his relatives. He had a great time. I gave him my old camera to use and kept reminding him everytime I talked to him to take pictures for us to see. The camera has been sitting in his room for a week so I confiscated it and decided I would post some pictures for everyone to see... I'm sure he'll put some on his facebook, but I don't do the facebook thing so I've picked out a few cute ones to blog. Thanks for the pics Tent!

Trent and mom at the airport having bonding time with some coldstone

notice Trent wearing a coat... Trent NEVER gets cold so he didn't bring a jacket... had to borrow one... it's a little bit cooler in Idaho than Arizona!

always horsin around... Trent is such a ladies man...

feeding time... Trent got some hands on country livin experience

awwww... kids and animals... always a cute picture

nice to see him helping out with the food Cousin Casey

Uncle Stu

Aunt Shirley

Twin Falls temple

Enjoying the view

There really are falls there

Cousin Drew

Thanks to everyone in Idaho for letting Trent hang out with you!

this week from our missionary...

Here's our weekly email from Brazil. It's great to see how Brandon's easy going personality has made a difference.

Oí família

This week nothing too exciting like an accident.... But i have the pics of the baptism here and some others. We´ve been teaching a member this week that just turned 8 and will get baptized this sunday. We don´t need to teach her but her family is demanding that we teach her. Its the same little girl in the birthday pic. Our branch president´s wife will have her baby this week, she will have a c section this week. She´s been in a lot of pain lately and she still has to walk everywhere because they don´t have a car and she has 3 other kids to take care of. All the members hated elder camargo as we have come to find out this week. I can see why, but i won´t say anything. They really like me and elder summerhays. They are so different now, i told elder summerhays that this is a completely different branch now. It´s weird how everyone changed for the better. Everything is good here in anápolis and i´m not needing anything for the time being... Anyone have questions? See you all later Tchau Elder Lewis

Pizza!

We all got together tonight to celebrate a little belated Fathers day/Aimee and girls are in town/time to get together and eat pizza! We met up at Peter Piper Pizza. I took my kids there MANY times over the years. The pizza is pretty good... the kids are entertained for quite a while... they love to get the little junky toys and candy with their tickets that we could have bought for 50 cents but spent $10 on tokens... and the best part is we leave the mess there!

Here's all the dad's that were there

All the dad's got a treat bag.

If you've never been to Peter Piper Pizza... there is a certain WAY to do things...FIRST you eat pizza and don't give the kids tokens until they have eaten a goodly amount of pizza... THIS is a VERY important step!

Then maybe ride some rides...
BUT... sooner or later they will realize that money will get tokens and tokens go in the little slots and then the fun begins!

Game time! This requires skill......and athletic talent!
OOPS!

THEN after you play all the silly little games TRYING SOOOO hard to get as many of these valued tickets as you can...

You put the hard earned tickets in the ticket eater...

and it counts the tickets for you... I will have to say that this technology is great... in the old days we had to count them individually!
and THEN you get the junky... cool toys and candy!

So there ya have it... our family and a great time at Peter Piper!

Dogs and frogs...

This weekend, along with the usual weekend stuff... cleaning, shopping, working on house blah blah blah... Mike and I dogsat ( two weenie dogs and a boxer, who thinks he's a weenie dog). When we told our primary class what we did, they said "Dogsat... what's that?!?" I thought it was a common term... but in case anyone else is wondering... dogsitting is the same as babysitting except with dogs instead of kids. And as an extra bonus... each evening we were greeted by some VERY noisy frogs hopping in and out of the pool. It was SO exciting that one evening we got a flashlight and watched (and listened) to frogs for almost two hours. Yeah I know... we're easily entertained.... Oscar
Rocky

Toby

Froggy

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there and ESPECIALLY to Mike and my boys... Dustin, Jaron and Steve!

the Crash...

Well... Friday morning started out with a BANG... literally. Mike was on his way to work and was run into by a motorcycle that ran a red light. The impact was behind him so he didn't know what hit him til he got out of the truck. All persons involved were very lucky to not be injured more than what they were. The motorcycle driver was walking around, but the passenger was taken to the hospital. We wish her a speedy recovery. Mike has a very sore hand... initial x-rays don't show a major break so we will just keep a watch on it. The driver window shattered but he only received a tiny cut... We're very thankful for guardian angels!

Mike has an older truck that he kept in almost perfect condition... kind of crinkled now...

Glass was everywhere... even in his shirt pocket!

The point of impact in the back...and damage all the way to the front tire.

So thankful that it wasn't worse... trucks can be replaced... anyone have a good truck for sale?

from Brazil...

Here's this weeks email from our missionary:

Oí família, We baptized again this week! I took pictures but i forgot to bring my camera with me today.Next week I´ll send pics. The baptism went well, her name is cecilia and she is good friends with the other kids we baptized these past few weeks. Transfers were this week too and...... I stayed the same. Elder Camargo went to Rio Verde and Elder Summerhayes is my companion now, he´s from Seatle Washington. He´s cool and a good missionary. When elder Camargo was packing up his stuff, we were talking and he said that i was his only companion that never argued with him or he never argued with. I was a bit surprised because he has a year and a half on the misson and has had a number of comps.... Aaron is in the mission neighboring mine now. The missions already combined. When i was in Uberlândia, I was in the same state as him. So he is pretty close to me. And Andrew Millet is in the mission next to me too, but on the other side. Aaron is on the right side and Andrew is on the left side. But all is good here in Anápolis and i will stay here for at least another 6 weeks....One of the elders in my zone used to be a professional soccer player before the mission on a very well known team, Palmeiras. And he droped everything he had going for him to go on a mission. So he came to our area and was a motivotional speaker. everyone here is crazy about soccer. But the activity didn´t go so well because of other things that were out of our hands, but we still had investigators there so that was good. Now that´s it , ask questions if you have any. Tchau Elder Lewis

This weekend...

This weekend was just a fine ol regular normal weekend. .. AND normal to me means WONDERFUL! I love normal! So some of the normal regular stuff was(in no particular order):
Help decorate a reception/party... something I used to do a lot (I kinda miss it)so it was great fun. Trent even helped... just like old times... Went to the reception/party of a dear friend of mine.... It was great to see how happy the two newlyweds were and great to see friends that were so much a part of my life for many years... and then we stayed to help tear down.. thanks Mike and Trent... which was also great fun cuz it was more time to catch up with my friends. ALSO... this weekend... we slept in... twice, I got new tires on my car... now it REALLY needs a wash, Mike worked on the floor some more, I went to the grocery store and the Mall, cooked, baked some brownies, ate brownies and ice cream... YUM... cleaned, did laundry ... almost finished, went swimming a little... I'm close to off white now... planned our primary leson, watched a movie and ate popcorn with Mike, decorated the bedroom a bit ... it's lookin good, checked out some new recipes I wanna try... went to church and now I'm blogging a little. Yep... It was a regular normal weekend... and I loved every bit of it!

from our missionary...

Here's the latest from Brazil and also a challenge to all of us!

Oí familia - Hey we baptized again! We baptized Luan and he´s 11 and he is one of the kids that asked us to be baptized.(Blessings from God) some others asked us if they could be baptized and we´ll baptize Cecilia next week. We don´t baptize at our church, we have to go to the stake center in the center of the city to baptize. Cecilia, who we´ll baptize next week, has learned tons of stuff already. It´s crazy because we haven´t taught alot of stuff to her yet but she already knows from reading the book of mormon, and remembering. Memory seems to be a nationwide fault here in Brasil. But it´s all good. We also had a conference with President Tobias the week which was good. We learned alot about leadership skills and acccomplishing our goals. We want to beat the missions in northeast brazil. The missions up there baptize a TON every month and we want those numbers down here in the central part. Sister Tobias also talked alot about health because it´s winter now and she doesn´t want anyone to get sick. It´s still warm here though. Arizona´s winters are alot colder. It gets cold for about 2 days a week and then back to warm. Cold is about 60 degrees and warm is about 85. But conference was good. President was playing with us at the end because he is going to have his 3rd baptism next week and he doesn´t do any tracting or anything like that. So you guys at home can still baptize people while not doing missionary `work´, but just talking to people that walk by you or you come across. That´s about it for my week so if you have any more questions just ask. Tchau Elder Lewis

We made it!

WARNING!!! This is a very LONG post but it covers a very LONG trip (1600 miles)! Friday was like a fun little mini vacation for me. I flew in to Nashville on a very early flight Friday morning.. Dustin and Joslyn picked me up and we had lunch at Mc D's (a popular stop on the trip)... and then we made a little detour and stopped at the Amish store. I just love driving into the Amish area... it is always beautiful and green and clean.
The corn fields were plentiful in Kentucky. I wish they were ready to harvest...

We went into this Amish store... I wished I lived by one of these.. It was food storage heaven.... bulk food, fresh butter and canned stuff (and the BEST gummy worms I've ever eaten... really!) and the coolest thing was they had a big glass window you could look through and watch the women make this stuff. I sooo wanted to take a picture of them because I was so impressed.. but I respected their culture and privacy.
Next stop was The kids home

and here is a picture of their newest addition... Snowball the rat!

We did a little family time and got ready to go to my favorite place for dinner...

The Wood Shed!!!! I can't say enough about how GOOD (everything I've had is great... I go there everytime I'm in Kentucky) and cheap their food is!!! They should spotlight this place on the food channel!

I had the catfish dinner.. only $5.95 and the best I've ever eaten! The hushpuppies are heavenly and the coleslaw and white beans... YUM!

Great down home cookin and very friendly people. We all had full happy tummies!

But no matter how full ya can't leave without some homemade pie!

So I had some great family time before we started out on the great adventure. Not too many pics.. we were on a mission to get to AZ in two days... It was dark when we left home and this is Missouri... we drove through All of the ozarks I think and we saw TREES for hours!

Sleep time...

great travelers...

Breakfast at McD's... Mmmmmmm

On to Oklahoma... I was trying to get a picture of that indian statue

VERY windy here... which was the ONLY bad part of the trip. We both got dust embedded eyes and Aimee had an eye that looked like a cherry by the time we got to the hotel. Everywhere we stopped the wind and dust sandblasted our eyes. Something we did not anticipate.. We got medicine for Aimees eye and it got better and I ruined my first pair of contacts.. wore my glasses part of the time (and had my sunglasses on top of them... I did NOT look glasmorous on this trip) then used another pair of contacts! I'm staying home from work today not because I'm tired, but to get my eyes back to normal.. because I can't even think about putting contacts in my eyes!

We stayed at the Hampton Inn in Clinton Oklahoma (yep we checked out the big cities!) we just COULDN'T drive any further... VERY nice and a much needed place to rest. We drove for 14 hours on Saturday!

All ready for another day of driving!

Amarillo by morning!!... here we are at ANOTHER McD's

We saw a LOT of NOTHING in Texas...

See all the WIND... STILL windy when we stopped in Tucumcari New Mexico.

Happy little travelers! (with a little help from grammy's bag of STUFF that would appear at just the right time!)
A whole LOT more NOTHING in New Mexico! If the world gets too overpopulated there is plenty of room still in Texas and New Mexico!

Yay.. a Taco Bell this time... (I can't believe how excited I was for Taco Bell!) we really ate high on the hog on this trip! (notice Aimee is covering her eye... see eye story above)

The end of the trip... most of the car is covered in bug guts from several states. We drove 15 hours on Sunday. I don't have a great here we are at home finally pic cuz it was late, dark and we just wanted to get to bed and close ours eyes and hope our eyeballs would still be there in the morning. But I will say that this 1600 mile long trip was very pleasant, the weather was good, the car drove smooth, the girls were cute and great and Aimee was a joy to be with. We are VERY thankful (and thanks to map quest... we never got lost once... although we questioned a little of mapquests definition of HIGHWAY through some little towns in Kentucky and Missouri)that we made it home safely!Family is great and it is GREAT to be home!