Family gone…

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This morning my mother, sisters and brother-in-law came up to our place to spend their last day with us.  My younger sister had brought her laptop with her and she showed us her slides and talked about her mission trip to Kenya this last summer.  She says my nephew has written about his experiences there, so I’ve asked her to have him send me what he’s written.  I’ll post it here if he does.  We were very interested to see Lauryn’s pictures and hear her stories from Kenya.

Then my older sister, Sherill, made sandwiches for us all with ingredients she had brought with her.  After lunch, my mom and sisters and I played Banana Scrabble (Bananagrams) while Mark and my brother-in-law, Fred, visited.  I should say that my mom and younger sister and I played while my older sister watched and looked up words for us in the Scrabble dictionary.  We played a bunch of games with my younger sister in, and when she tired of it, my mother and I played on for several more games.  My older sister said she got stressed just watching us because it’s kind of a fast-paced game.

When Mom finally called it quits on the Scrabble, we all piled into our two cars and drove to Los Gatos.  Even though we have a Los Gatos address and we’ve driven through Los Gatos on our way elsewhere before, we couldn’t understand why everyone raves about it.  Today we turned down a side street and discovered a part of Los Gatos we’ve never seen before.  There was a whole street of trendy shops and restaurants and we women walked several blocks looking in all the windows and reading menus before selecting a restaurant in which to have dinner.  We had left the menfolk with our cars, so when we finally found a place to eat, we called them and they drove up.  We had a really nice dinner of burgers and milkshakes, and then my older sister and her husband said their farewells to all of us and left to parts south of here.

My mom and younger sister had some time to kill before we took them to their train, so we did some more window shopping in Los Gatos.  Then we drove them to the Amtrak station where I had hoped to go in and see them off, but parking cost $20 so we said a hasty goodbye at the front door.  The place that has been filled with laughter and love for the last several days suddenly feels so empty.

A really amazing thing happened over this visit.  Weather reports kept showing that it was going to rain in this area while they were here.  My mom and older sister were praying even before they got down here that the rain would hold off while they were here.  It did, and tonight with half of them going south and the other half going north, we hear rain on our roof!

Here are some pictures from their visit:

Mom at Cocoanut Grove 10/8/12 Playing Banana Scrabble Lauryn napping under my cowgirl hat