Curiouser and Curiouser

It has been a long time since we have gone to the Museum of Curiosity. The kids' memories make it a magical place, but I was pretty sure they would be a little too old to feel the same way. But it would also make for a good distraction on a lazy Monday, so we went for it.

I had the three regular monkeys. (Robyn was hanging out in CA at FSY, which she already posted about!)

The Rainforest always seems to be the most exciting with the bridges and interactive animal stuff, so we went there first.

We did the high jump. Everyone did pretty well, but I claimed the highest jump, thank you very much. Only by one inch, but I'll take it.

The sloth hang is always a favorite. They made me go first so everyone could beat my score. Whatever makes the kids happy. :)

Then they made me crawl around through all the kid climbing area. I made it but I'm just not as young as I used to be. We paused for a photo on the bridge.

Then I escaped. The kids went back in and instead, I went to the other thing. I can't remember what it is called, but it is a cool maze with little challenges inside. You complete each one and then check your answer at the Mind's Eye. Naturally, I got them all correct. 

It was fun to watch the kids go through later. They did really well. The only station they struggled on was smell. (That was actually tricky for me too) They guessed cinnamon, but it was chocolate.

Then over to Water Works.

We didn't stay here long. I don't think the girls wanted to get very wet. But we did play in the wind tunnel for a bit.

Next, out to the garden.

It was such a nice day to be outside. So we played. 

They still have the fun little zip sit. There is a weight limit, but guess what? I was under the limit, so you bet your bippy that I rode on that thing. 

We went into the "maze." There weren't that many turns or twists, but Pearl did a great a"maze"d face for me.

There was a pond out there. Ivory and I went to stand by the edge to watch the fish. There were a few koi out there. But we must have been standing in the feeding spot because a few turned into more and then there were dozens coming our way. I felt bad because we didn't have any food for them. :(

You can also view them from under the water which was pretty cool.

Earlier, we had seen signs for the Thanksgiving Point Gardens and how they have new big dinosaurs there. Well, the Museum Garden butts up against the bigger Gardens and we could see some of the dinosaurs. They were automatons and they moved and made noise. They were pretty cool.

We still had a couple more stops, so we went back indoors to Kidopolis. Daisy was busy losing a tooth, so I stepped aside to make a phone call while the kids went in. (When you lose a tooth and it has a bracket attached to it, you have to call the orthodontist to get your tooth out.)

We went through the area rapidly. I still like the stop motion video area. And it is always fun to find the hidden entrance into the bank. In the matching game, I made 15 dollars and some change. Nothing compared to Daisy, who matched the hundred.

We played with the strange mirrors. It was really funny since one had a ripple effect. Ivory didn't realize how it worked. She could see that when she blinked, her eyelids didn't blink at the same time. She thought that the action was slowed down, so she told me later that she thought her eyelids actually blinked at different times. :) Hahaha.  

Last stop was the extra area. They had a lot of NASA stuff in there. I actually enjoyed reading through a lot of the info and doing the challenges. The girls just made the cool paper airplanes and tried them out to see whose would go furthest. Let's just say that my expertly folded plane did not do so well against the competition. You win some and you lose some.

It's about time to wrap up this day of fun and exploration. Although it was not the experience they remember as kids, it was still fun to relive some old memories and make some new ones. In the end, spending time together is the most important thing. 

Swimming with the Cicadas

(June 17th, 2022)

Our water day took us to a new location. We went out to explore Spanish Oaks Reservoir. It's another little man-made lake that is great for paddle boarding and swimming. Or at least, it would be great for swimming if it wasn't so frigid. Sure, you get used to the cold, but I'm not sure if that is because your body acclimates or because your limbs go numb.

Its up in the hills in a secluded spot. There wasn't much parking, so that was a little tricky, but after I dropped off the girls I found a spot up by the bike trail. The first thing I noticed when I got out of the car was the noise. All the noise, noise, noise, noise! There were so many cicadas buzzing and humming. 

Here are the kids getting ready and trying out the water. Guaranteed Pearl can't feel her feet out there. :)

And here are the hills behind me. The beach was actually very nice and sandy. Perfect for playing in or laying down.

The cicadas were not as loud on the beach, but their presence was still...present. They would land on you while you were sitting or you would find them on or under your towel. Along the water's edge was a line of dead cicadas swept back on shore. Here is a dead one that Robyn took a picture of.

The lake has fish, which I'm sure are sustained by the cicadas. Plenty of bugs were floating on the water and frequently you would see a fish snag one from the surface. Once I even saw a seagull come sailing down. I thought he was going to land on the water, but at the last minute he swooped down and came back up holding a good sized fish. (I wonder if the fisherman were as successful?)

Ivory decided at some point that she wanted to see if she could swim across the pond. It wasn't so large that it wasn't doable, but the cold was enough that it didn't seem like the greatest idea. But she can be very determined. The sides of the reservoir are concrete, except where there is sand. So Ivory started in one corner and swam to the other, with Daisy in the water with her. 

When she tired, she would backstroke, but then she couldn't see where she was going, so she probably swam further than the actual length of the reservoir since she was often swimming in the wrong direction. I paddled along with her and yelled whenever she veered too far in one direction. And she made it!! Definitely an accomplishment in such cold water.

We had a lot of fun. All the girls crashed for a while. I recently purchased the giant towel and I love it. 

We played some 500 with a frisbee later. That was a lot of fun too, but the wind kept taking the frisbee farther than we planned. It is always awkward to apologive when you hit someone with a rogue frisbee.

It was very windy at times. I'm not sure if Robyn is hiding from the sun, wind, or bugs in this picture, but she takes after her mother. 

It was a really fun day. We stayed until we were done with water and sun. I should mention that the water felt a lot better by the time we left, so maybe it warms up slowly and you should go in the afternoon? But we'll keep this place in mind for another day.

Shout Out for Dad

(June 19th, 2022)

I've learned not to overthink Father's Day. Tyler doesn't really want a lot of hullabaloo. He doesn't mind a gift here and there, but it is often better to let him pick it out. Which is exactly what I did this year. He mentioned that he wanted a new grill. We've had a little charcoal Weber since we were married.

But with a charcoal grill, you have to plan in advance to let the coals warm up. Tyler was ready for the next level. So I gathered all the kids up and we took Dad around to different places to find his new beauty.

Tyler eventually found what he wanted at Home Depot. I admit that I was a little bored. I was a little tired and trying to entertain a couple kids while Tyler found just what he wanted. Outside Home Depot there were some birds nesting in the rafters. (I feel like a lot of the big home improvement stores house birds—inside and out.) We spent some time watching them and then somehow the conversation turned to bird poop and how Grandma Dargan has been lucky enough to be pooped on. (It is lucky, look it up.)

From there, Robyn said she would give me or Pearl $10 if a bird pooped on us. That's an easy $10. Well, it's easy to stand under a bird, but much harder to get it to poop on you. But we dutifully tried. That is me and Pearl and can you look above us to see the mark? (Or are we the mark?)

Regardless, we sat there for a long time, shifting slightly when the bird adjusted. It definitely seemed a fruitless endeavor, until suddenly Pearl smiled and said, "It pooped on me" and sure enough, there was the smallest amount of bird poop on her shirt. Robyn was as good as her word and paid Pearl $10, but she was rather disappointed at the quantity of poop distributed by the bird.

But enough about birds...let's get back to Dad. He found his grill and we took it home. It looks great, doesn't it? We tried it out that week and I will attest that Tyler is still the best griller in the west.

On actual Father's Day, we also got Tyler some bath bombs. These ones smelled really good and we all know that Dad loves a good bath. (This one here smells great...smells like Mother's crazy sister Kate.) (Serious props if you get that reference.)

Then just a couple pictures with the pretties. 

I should probably mention his amazing hair. Tyler is known for his hair having a style of its own. And we're glad it didn't disappoint on his special day.

Surrounded by Gringos Again

Mis amigos! 

It was another great week here in the DR.

My comp turned 20 this week! It turns out to be ridiculously hard to surprise someone who is always with you and who you share a phone with. Her official birthday gift from me is going to be a Japanese Book of Mormon once the Elders get it ordered in, but she found out about that. And the other main thing we did to celebrate was food. I made her apple cinnamon pancakes in the morning and we got lunch at a panadería (bakery) we've both been dying to visit all transfer because it smells amazing whenever we walk by. And for dinner we got lucky and one of the people we were teaching decided to make us food while we taught her husband. He has lots of questions so she apparently realized how long the lesson would take and cooked the whole time so she could feed us at the end. And it turned out to be Hermana Fernández's favorite food.

I was trying hard to make her birthday really fun, especially cuz it's her only one on the mission. I think it worked pretty well.

The fruit of the week was a limoncillo, which looks like a tiny lime and is really only a large seed with a teeny bit of fruit surrounding it, then the skin. You bite it just a little to break the skin, then you put the seed in your mouth and suck the fruit off. Not very filling but possibly my favorite of the fruits I've tried. Which by that I just mean it was really good cuz I've had so many good fruits that I can't pick a favorite.

We had interviews this week! I love my mission president and it was awesome to talk with him and receive counsel as well as just get pumped up by a great friend. El Presidente Breton is such an awesome mission president!

This week we had one of the most spiritual Restoration lessons I've ever had, and it was over the phone. When we called the guy a few days later for another lesson, we asked him if he prayed and he said yes and that he could tell it was true. So we changed our plan, taught lesson three, and invited him to get baptized. He was hesitant to commit at first because he understands that baptism is a sacred covenant with God and didn't feel ready. We set the date for a month out to give him time to prepare. Our next lesson with him was on the Book of Mormon and he was like, "I need to study this book," so excited to have more access to the word of God so he could read it and pray about it. This guy's fuego.

ALSO we've got a friend who's a little crazy and needs to change a lot of things in his life in order to be baptized. He has expressed some interest in baptism but also doesn't seem very willing to change his ways. We're working with him. He's come to church twice now, and we had a lesson about the importance of going to church. He told us he wasn't coming this week because "this Sunday is for me". He was headed to the beach with some friends to relax and we could not talk him out of it. Because we know him pretty well we threw everything at him, and the funny thing is that he agreed with every single thing we said, then was like, "Yeah, I'm not going." He basically said we'd never be able to convince him. We kept praying that he would change his mind but I had kind of just given up on him being at church this Sunday. Then he came! We were shocked. We asked him what made him change his mind and he said his friends had to cancel the trip. I love God's sense of humor sometimes.

I've heard about humanitarian groups before who go to another country for a few weeks and build a school. There's one in our area right now! Like thirty gringos have arrived. And I didn't realize that they would be so church based. I thought this type of thing was more of a service project, but it's big on missionary work too. The gringos ran Sacrament meeting yesterday, and I was impressed that a couple of sixteen year olds gave talks in Spanish. Terrible Spanish, but they did it. Then later in the day they went on missionary visits with us and some other members in the ward, to visit inactive members.

It's really fun to have a bunch of Americans around. They're gonna be here for two weeks and they're doing a bunch of activities that we get to be involved in as missionaries because they are missionary related. I'm so excited for the other activities! The youth are so much fun and they have strong testimonies. I'm trying to learn all of their names and I'm making good progress.

Another fun thing with that is that they asked us to translate the lesson in young womens for all the gringas. And I DID IT! I didn't know I was good enough at Spanish to translate Dominican Spanish for an hour straight, and translate all the youths' comments back into Spanish so the girls in our ward could understand. Basicamente, the gift of tongues is real.

This whole transfer has been amazing. Today's the last day of it, and I get to stay in Las Antillas with my new comp Hermana Anderson. I'm so excited to work with her! I'm really gonna miss Hermana Fernandez cuz she has been a fantastic comp and taught me so much—about how the DR works, about Spanish, about how to teach with the Spirit. We've had so much fun together. I met Hermana Anderson at an activity with all the sisters in the mission that we had a few weeks ago and she is really fun too so I think this next transfer's gonna be just as good!

Hermana Cazier 

Pics

1. Finally replaced my broken watch, and in American money it only cost $5.50!

2. I love my comp!

3. Limoncillo

4. That's the DR national flower

5. Croissants from the panadería 

6. Panqueques

7. My comp's cute haircut 

8. The difference between a Dominican and an American 

The rest: us messing around cuz we're still just weird teenagers... well actually now that my comp's 20 I guess I'm the only weird teenager here

One more picture, but not from June, but from her mom. One of the sweet Humanitarian girls took a picture and sent it along to me. It is always nice to get random pictures of my awesome missionary and her stellar companion.