Fun times with Mindi in town

Last Friday, Lindsey's friend, Mindi, arrived from Colorado for a visit. She just left for home today and each one wished that Mindi could stay another week to visit. Mindi and Lindsey have known each other their entire lives and even had their baptism service together when they were eight years old when we lived in Colorado. Mindi's dad, John, was Kelly's roommate at BYU, plus Kelly's family has been friends with Mindi's mom's family for years, going on many family ski trips to Vail, and other fun social events. Mindi, six weeks younger than Lindsey, has always towered over Lindsey in height, as you can see in the pictures below. They spent this past week as roommates in San Antonio at EFY and had a blast and a very uplifting week together. The theme at EFY this year was Power in Purity, which they really enjoyed and thought this was the best EFY yet. Saturday morning after Mindi arrived, we talked about going out to breakfast at Village Inn, but instead, Kelly and I made a huge breakfast of waffles, bacon, eggs, and hash browns. I left the last waffle in the waffle iron and forgot about it until Christopher smelled it over cooking. I suggested they take it outside to use as a Frisbee. I missed photographing the initial toss, but the kids pieced together what was left of the hard-as-a-rock waffle flying object. It was good, clean fun and they got a kick out of it. A few days later when I made waffles, Christopher unsuccessfully begged me to burn one.

Lindsey's other friend, Zach, has been basically living at our house since he's been in town. Christopher, who idolizes Zach, is going to be so sad when they move in a couple of weeks. They're selling their house and heading back to Taiwan where they live most of the year.

We took Zach and Mindi out to dinner at the Oasis on Saturday night. There was a long wait of about an hour, so to pass the time, I stayed preoccupied by taking several pictures of everyone for entertainment.

Lovely pose of Christopher trying to be silly leaning into the cactus.

Here they all were posing by the cactus and Zach actually accidentally got pricked by it...ouch!

We're getting hungry by now. Is it going to be worth the long wait?

Zach tried hard to not smile in most of the pictures and was hoping to be "dern sassy," as he called it. That's not what he was originally expressing. However, I encouraged him to change the word he was actually striving for in his modeling, and came up with "sassy" as a close replacement. I convinced him that a 16-year-old LDS young man shouldn't be trying to be "dern sexy," and he agreed. "Why are moms always right about things like that?" he asked.

On Saturday morning, Lindsey, Mindi, and I got manicures and pedicures and here we are creating a lone star with our lovely nails.

Before heading off to EFY the next morning, Zach and Austin came over to hang out with Lindsey and Mindi for a few hours and they had a ball. As he was leaving, Austin (pictured here with the girls) said, "next time, the party is at my house!" So last night after they got home from EFY, he had them over with a few other kids and they had one last hoorah before Mindi's departure. Mindi and Austin became each other's C.O.W. (crush of the week) and were sad that they might not ever see each other again. In the meantime, they've sent each other literally hundreds of text messages this week.

Here's a quick pose of the girls before Austin's party.

We took Mindi to the airport this afternoon. Lindsey and she will see each other again sometime soon when Lindsey and Christopher fly out to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Colorado the end of July through mid-August. What a fab week for these too best friends!