Gotta love having friends around!!

It has been so wonderful having the Taylors be able to stay for so long. During the last 8 months of their rv trip (that you can read about here) there haven't been many places that they've stayed at for a whole week. It's been great getting to see such special friends for so many days in a row. Every night when they go back to the RV camp to go to bed, everyone just says "Good night, see you tomorrow!" Awesome! Well, to add to the great fun, Mason had a birthday on Wednesday, and to surprise him, the Hagens (minus Wade-we missed you Wade!) made a last minute decision to hop on a plane on Tuesday and come into town for 24 hours. It was so sweet and special for them to make the effort to do that for such a short time! We crammed a lot of fun into that 24 hours. We had a birthday party for Mason at the RV park, complete with swimming in the heated pool, balloons, birthday cake, Nerf gun wars, capture the flag, and lots of giggling and laughing. Cheryl and Jennifer and I even had a nice time letting Dan watch the kids while we hung out and visited in the RV, like grown ups! :-) It really is like having family around.

Well, after the party at the RV park, we all headed to Incredible Pizza for hours of fun and food. Mason had never been to IP, but I think now he's hooked!


Jonathan, Griffin, Mason, Katie and Madison at Incredible Pizza. Everyone else was still in the gameroom or back to the buffet for more.

After IP, we all headed back to our house to watch The Biggest Loser. Turns out the Taylors enjoy the show as much as we do. What a blast we had with even more people yelling at the TV than normal! :-) The Hagens had never watched it before. The jury is still out to see if they'll ever watch it again, but Jennifer and I are already planning Dagerath/Taylor conference calls on Tuesday nights to simultaneously watch the show!

Then Wednesday morning, Katie went with J&J to BBall at the crack of dawn. We picked the three of them up at 10 and headed over to Hemisfair park downtown. It's just around the corner from Michael's office. The Taylor crew met us there and we played for about 1/2 an hour before having to rush the Hagens off to the airport.

Griffin, Josiah, Mason, Madison, Jeffrey, Ellie, Katie, Jonathan and Jeremy at Hemisfair park in downtown SA.

Cheryl, me, Dan and Jennifer at the park. It's incredibly great to have people you know and love just hanging around to talk to!!

All of us posing for a timed picture at the park. I'm surprised we got everyone looking in the same direction by the time the picture clicked.

After the sad deposit of the Hagens at the airport, I met back up with everyone and we met Michael for lunch, walked down the riverwalk, went to the Alamo and shamelessly lobbied to have the Taylors move to SA! :-) But the evening wasn't done yet....

Dan and Jennifer kept the boys while Michael and I went on a date. Jennifer made salt dough Christmas ornaments with the kids (impressive!) and there was a Wii Lego Batman tournament. Word was it was crazy and FULL of laughing.

Today promises a day of more "hanging out" with friends. We do have some school to do, after all, we've done precious little (or actually NONE) this week. But after that we're going to go hang at the RV park for a while and swim and play. Then J&J have their first BBall game tonight.

Tomorrow, we're going to catch the early (cheap) showing of Madagascar 2 before the Taylors roll out of town I-10 to Houston. :-( We may just follow them! It's going to be sad to say goodbye. We've had such a wonderful time. It's been such a blessing that will certainly be one we mention at Thanksgiving this year!