Pearl River Visit

December 20-21, 2013

We reached Pearl River from Baton Rouge in the afternoon and had a wonderful dinner with Jeff and family before going out to Abita Springs for the night.

On Saturday morning we were planning to go to Ashleigh and Jordan's soccer game, but it turned out that it was canceled. They were already in their uniforms when they found out so they wanted to go over to the soccer field to practice.

Ashleigh and Jordan got in a lot of practice at shots on goal.

They fired on each other in goal, so they got practice at both shooting and defending. After this they played hide-and-seek with Elyse until the rain drove us all indoors.

Late in the afternoon, Jordan got out her guitar and had a singalong on some Christmas carols.

Jordan with Elyse and her friend Madison did quite a credible job with "The Twelve Days of Christmas", and even remembered all the words.

December 22, 2013

We joined Jeff and family at church and then took them out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant afterward. It poured rain all afternoon and into the night.

The girls all decided to go out with us to Abita Springs to spend the night. Here they get into a game on the bed. After supper we watched a movie "Monsters University" and then played a long game of Monopoly.

December 23, 2013

Elyse likes to join Granddad when he shaves. Maybe not many men shave with shavecream and a razor any more. Her Dad shaved with an electric razor, and he hasn't shaved at all lately since he is sporting a several-inch long beard. She of course removes the lather with the plastic guard attached to the razor. She is gracious in responding to the same old jokes about her maybe losing a nose if the blade guard comes off.

Brenda fixed a nice breakfast and afterward Granddad and the girls went out to explore the dock and lake. Ashleigh wanted to experiment with the camera, so Rod got pried out from behind the camera.

We spooked some ducks into flight from the surface of the shallow lake.

A flock of grazing coots was not nearly so concerned about our presence.

Later in the morning we left Abita Springs and drove to the south of Slidell to the Bayou General Store that we had enjoyed visiting in 2009.

They had this huge stuffed alligator there for our amusement. So what do you do? You feed the smallest child to it of course!

Elyse examines the real and very sharp teeth of a small alligator. There was a lot of alligator merchandise of both the real and stuffed or painted variety.

We decided to stick with the stuffed variety of alligators. Ashleigh does the sisterly thing and feeds Jordan to the big gator.

They had some realistic looking molded alligators as well, and the girls visit one on our way out.

We returned to the house and the girls got involved in one of their Christmas traditions: the making of decorated Christmas cookies.