Labor Day Stalder Reunion

After a stormy Sunday night, it was surprising to see bright, hot sun, cool breezes, and happy attitudes when we woke up on Monday. After a slow morning of sleeping in, we were ready to start our day off. We quickly packed up and headed up to Mom and Dad's. It was great! We started playing soccer at a local church field. Though the teams were lacking in people, it was totally fun. Joseph found out how much he loves to kick the ball, get in the middle of everything, and decided that he doesn't like water poured on his hot head to cool him down.

After a quick break of cooling off in the ice box...err rather the pool. It was a blast trying to get each other in the freezing pool, without getting in ourselves. Joseph even got in the pool and enjoyed it.

To warm up after the pool, we ate a typical Brazilian lunch: sausage and black bean soup on rice, fresh pineapple, jello salad, and a milkshake lemonade. To allow us time to digest our yummy, filling lunch, we decorated our T-shirts, and wrote Josh a letter out of sticky letters. It was a lot of fun, trying to spell as many words as we could without resorting to using a marker. However, we could only get so far, until all the vowels were gone. So Josh'll have a very brightly colored and funny letter to read when he gets it. This was also Joseph's nap time, so when we woke up right before our next activity, it was great timing!

Next up Botchie Ball. This was so much fun, though if you don't stretch before and after you play your arms, shoulders, and upper back muscles are SUPER DUPER sore. Travis won by far. Though each of us succeeded in botching up his high score. After a unanimous vote of moving onto dessert. Travis willingly accepted our vote of him as winner in favor of the food.

After a quickly disappearing dessert, we headed out to the Secret Garden for picture time. After a time, the youngest members of our family decided it was time for something new. We trouped onto the deck for some family unity games of hula hoop. First up was the human circle where we passed our bodies through two different hula hoops circling us in opposite directions. It was a lot of fun to see how quickly we could accomplish this task. After the Human circle, came Show Off Time. Which consisted of anyone who thought they could or rather everyone who couldn't hula hoop, prove that they couldn't hula hoop. That evolved into Dare Devil show down, to see who could run through the hoop before it fell. It was a great laugh!

After a rigorous ab workout, we decided to target our brain waves. Mom set up tissue paper for each of us, and using a collection of colored and scented bubbles, we painted our master pieces. It was a ton of fun! We painted the deck, our hands, fingers, feet, T-shirts, each other...we decided to stop before something terrible happened. It was really cool. The only sad part was Joseph really wanted to blow the bubbles, but we didn't want him to go home with a green, blue, red, or brown mouth. Poor kid, but Uncle Bart helped us out. He brought out normal colored bubbles, but special kinds. He bought some silicon bubbles so Joseph and all of us got to catch the bubbles, and try to wipe off the plastic leftovers from our hair, shirts, and shoes.

After a very long, fun, and hot day it was time to quit and eat some grub. Not literally, otherwise we'da...anyways. We were starving. So while the "Men folk" occupied themselves with some basket ball, I got to keep Joseph and Mom company while keeping Joseph from thinking about basket ball, since he was too young to join in. After dinner we had a wonderfully uplifting lesson from Mom, to put the finishing touches on such a GREAT day! She topped her meaningful lesson with a sweet surprise: Chocolate Fudge Brownie. It was the best ever!!

To see the full account of our day, look forward to the slide shows that are coming!