I love pictures like this.  They just look like God’s light shining down from Heaven reminding us of God’s love.

It’s been a perfectly lovely weekend and I feel like this picture!  My sister and her family came out to visit us on Friday.  We really haven’t seen them for about a year.  They helped us pack our house up in California and watched us leave as we drove to our new life in Arizona.  My sister and her husband did come out a few months go, but we only saw them for a few hours.  I drove the kids out to their hotel room, but their kids weren’t there and my dh wasn’t able to get off work then.

So yesterday, I don’t know how it got started, but somehow everyone took out their cell phones and began passing them around.  We oohed and aaahed over the colors, features and then it happened.  It was a cell phone party!  Hannah, my neice, texted her mother who was sitting two people away from her on the couch.  She texted back.  My son was intrigued so Hannah taught him how and he texted his sister who was on the other couch.  It was so funny!  They talked to each other as they texted each other and everyone had a perfectly lovely time.

It’s been so long since my sister and I had time to be silly together. They came here on Friday to see the house and we had a special lunch and dinner.  We had to improvise seating arrangements as we simply couldn’t get 7 adult sized people and one small Christopher around my kitchen table.  We did something I think only my sister would think of.  We had boys in the kitchen and girls in the dining room.  And it was perfect!  We had two husbands and two sons in the kitchen and the two of us and our two daughters in the dining room.

Yesterday we all hung around the house and laughed all morning, went out to lunch and then stopped off at their hotel, which turned out to be a gorgeous townhome.  My son and her daughter (she’s 12 but 5′ 3″!) went swimming all afternoon while my dd and sister took turns playing ping pong with my nephew (he’s almost 16 and almost 6ft tall! They grow ’em big in Orange County! We think it’s something in the water!).

It was so funny!  My dd, Kelsey, pinged that pong ball all over the rec room.  It bounced off the walls, the floor and even the light fixture til we were rolling because it looked like she was playing by herself!  Then my sister played against her son and we all laughed so hard as they added more ping pong balls and paddles to the game.  At one point they had two paddles each and three balls in the air at all times.  Some of them occasionally hit the ceiling, the light fixture, came across the room.  Kelsey and I tried to catch them as they came by.  It was a blast!

We brought Chinese food in for dinner and segeregated ourselves by gender again.  My neice was hysterical.  She and Kelsey had us moms in stitches all throughout.

We had such a blast getting to know the kids again.  It got me thinking that we had more time to talk with them and be silly on this trip than we have had in many years of busy birthday parties. We lived over an hour away from them in California so getting together was done mostly for holidays and other events.  With all our activities and obligations,  they were the only times we could get together.  But this visit was just for fun and we laughed and shared more in two days than we were able to do in quite some time!

They’ll be over again today after church and we will spend some time before they have to head back to California.  I sure will miss them.  It’s not the same when you spend time on the phone, but these memories will draw us closer when we do have phone visits from now on.  What a blessing and I’m thanking God for time to share and have fun with my sister and her family this weekend.

Have you had a weekend like this?  Come share!

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