Trip to Grandmother's house -- June 12 - June 18

First of all -- Happy Fourth of July, everyone!  :-)  I hope y'all had a great day yesterday.  Today Daddy is off from work, and I'm not going to my usual volunteer job, so we're all home (well, almost; Juli's attending a class out of town).

When we go to Grandmother's house, we have multiple options on which road we want to take.  This time we decided to avoid I-35, and took the scenic route: Hwy 183 to 67, then on from there (I don't remember all the roads we take).  When you take 183, you stop through some little towns between here and Dallas.  Hico, one of the larger ones, has a little shop that has attracted Daddy for a long time but at which we had never stopped because we didn't have time.  This trip we made time.  For one thing, we stopped in Hico for dinner anyway, so it didn't take that much longer to step inside this store for awhile.  Want to know what they sell?  I'll give you three guesses:

You win!  :-)  We looked around inside for about 15 minutes, then Daddy bought some truffles before we headed out and walked over to a restaurant for dinner.

While we were at Grandmother's house, Debra celebrated her 18th birthday.  Goodness, does time fly...  No one can believe that she's actually left the childhood years behind.  :-)  Grandmother had baked her a cake, which we served after lunch on "The Big Day" (Sunday).

After cleaning up the kitchen, we all moved to the den where she opened an assortment of presents and cards.

Later in the afternoon, the youngs put on their swimsuits and headed down to Swimming Hole for some fun.

The big project for this trip was making houses on the side of the bluff, using materials such as clay (for the main building), leaves, sticks, rocks, and all other sorts of pieces of nature to provide some very creative masterpieces.

This is some stairway!