The youth were told to do a fundraiser for their youth conference. We actually have 9 youth right now, believe it or not! Rach, Coli, Cait, and the 2 Yu kids, a boy who lives in Xuzhou, and 3 kids from the Faucet family who are here for 6 weeks. So a not to shabby sized group of youth went this year. They decided to do a "pancake dinner" at our house on a Saturday evening. They did a great job. There were pancakes, eggs, bacon and a fruit salad. I think everyone went away still hungry, but it was a fundraiser, what more can you ask for?
The hotel brought over some tables and chairs and we had a nice "candle light" dinner. The youth served everyone.
I've never had so many people in my kitchen at once!
After the dinner, the girls did some hula dancing that Sister Panoke taught them. Everyone loved it.
Our Nicole turned 14 on April 28Th! Happy Birthday Nicole! It was the break, so I took the girls to lunch and a foot massage that day. Then, Nicole wanted pizza, and pavlova for her dinner. She was also able to go to the youth conference dance and is very excited to go to EFY now that she is 14!
We woke up one morning this last week to this beautiful creature in the kitchen! He is at least 2 1/2 inches long! Then, we found another one in the kitchen yesterday! Is there a colony of huge ugly beetle things in my kitchen? Or maybe the same one likes us so much he found his way back??
The boys and Mike and I did some exploring while the girls were gone to Youth conference. We went to the zoo one day. This is a tiger cage, we thought might be a good thing to try out with the boys :-)
We went to these 2 really neat caves. The boys loved them. They do crazy things like put colored fluorescent lights all around. It looks pretty psychedelic.
Apparently there have been ancient bones found in this cave, so they put this nice neanderthal man in it. It freaked Jay out when he saw it. I think he jumped 5 feet! One sad thing was that we could have bought some stalactites on our way out. They chop them off and make carvings out of them and sell them. We didn't buy any.
We also went to the ancient stone quarry to see where 100,000 workers were commissioned to carve a huge monument out of stone by the Emperor Ju Li. They got quite into the project when they figured that they would never be able to move the stone. It was just too heavy. So, they just had to abandon the project. It's amazing because you can see the lines where they carved by hand. So much work!
OH...this first photo is one I had Mike take because we saw this beautiful tunnel of fake flowers on the way, and I always see ladies posing like this for photos...Don't worry, you too could look this special with plastic grapes and tinsel. If only you could find some!
There were 3 or 4 different parts of this big sculpture. This was supposed to be the head.
We read that just the base is over 250,000 tons.
