August 2016 (part 2)

We still hadn't used our free Snowbird summer day passes and didn't want to get stuck going on a Saturday like last year, so we made time on the very last day of summer vacation to take Alta and Ellie.

I took Ellie to her 1st grade orientation that morning, then packed lunch and snacks, picked up Dan, and dropped Olive off at Lorna's for the day. We got to the Snowbird parking lot and were thrilled to find it practically empty! We were able to pack in so many rides on the alpine slide, the mountain coaster, the mountain flyer zip line (I was especially impressed the girls rode this one as much as they did!), and everything else.

The rock wall:

 Dan giving Ellie some pointers:

The Peruvian lift was closed so we got to ride the tram for free instead! It was the girls' first time and they thought it was really fun. The scenery was gorgeous as always:

 We ate our lunch in the new lodge with this view in the background:

 And then hiked around just a little bit:

 We got Ellie to do the ropes course this year and she really warmed up to it by the end. Alta is pretty fearless up there! They convinced me to put a harness on and try too; I lasted about five minutes. I thought I was getting better with heights but I was not a fan.

One of the last things we all did was the Vertical Drop. It's a 50-foot tower that you climb up and then  put a harness on and jump off. This kind of thing is terrifying to me but some punk 12-year-old kid told me I would be "one of those lame moms" if I didn't do it. So I did. And screamed. Alta and Ellie both jumped as well (and of course Dan). I didn't have my phone on me so a family at the bottom offered to let me use theirs to take a video and then text it to myself. They all cheered so loud for Alta and Ellie when they got up the courage to jump! I think Alta actually did it more than once.

They were starting to close everything up at the end of the day and the girls wanted one last turn on the trampolines. While they were jumping I got a phone call from my doctor's office. I had gotten a blood test the week before so we could find out the gender early and I knew that this call had to be the results. I answered and put the phone in between Dan and I so we could both hear, and we both were completely in shock when they told us it's a BOY!!! Dan yelled over to the girls while they were jumping that they were getting a brother and they were both so excited.

We left as they were closing Snowbird and even though we had time to get Ellie to gymnastics, they were both so completely exhausted we decided to call it a day and just got dinner, picked up Olive, and headed home. We also had back to school night so we stopped by the school for that.

The next day was the first day of school. Alta and Ellie were both excited to start a new year.

Alta's grade has always had 4 classes but this year they only had two teachers until just a few weeks before school started when they hired a third. Alta got the newly hired teacher, Mrs. Scott, and all the class sizes were much bigger than they'd been before. I wasn't sure what to expect but more on that in a different post. Ellie got the teacher she wanted: Mrs. Barbano, Alta's 1st grade teacher. We were both happy!

(Side note: we painted our front door over the summer! It looks really dark in that photo above but it's a blue color, dark but not navy. It was such a small change but I love how it looks. Someday I'll get around to switching out light fixtures and the house numbers!)

I wasn't sure how Olive would react to being an only child all day. She loved playing with all the girls' stuff without anyone telling her not to:

but she also would not. stop. talking. Months later and she's still the same, and while it can be a little exhausting I love listening to her funny thoughts and stories she tells me!

That Friday Alta got to go to her friend Izzie's "gross out" birthday party. They got points for doing things like cracking eggs over their heads and reaching their hands in a bag of live crickets (which Alta actually did!!!). Izzie's mom texted me this picture of Alta:

My birthday was that Sunday and since my mom had offered to have the girls over for a sleepover like she had last year, we planned an overnight getaway to Park City for that Friday. We picked Alta up from her party and headed straight to Provo to drop off the girls.

I didn't take any pictures but we had a great time! We decided to eat at Zoom again since we loved it so much the year before. Our waitress actually recognized us and it turns out she had served us the year before! We stayed at the Hyatt Centric at the Canyons and loved walking around the ski resort the next morning. We stopped by the outlets for some quick shopping (where I bought a few baby boy clothes because I couldn't help myself) and then back to Provo to pick up the girls.

It's always a relief to hear they were well-behaved for my parents! They love staying the night there and always have so much fun. My parents even took us all out to lunch at Riverside when we got there. Olive was wearing this funny crown and skirt she'd made with Grandma, but it's hard to see it in this picture:

That Sunday for my birthday we went to the Browers for my birthday dinner and to finally meet Mitchell's fiance, Emmie! (He'd proposed to her when he visited her in Sweden over the summer and none of us had met her.)

And now just a couple of pictures from the last few days of August. On Monday morning I met up with some friends at the Thanksgiving Point gardens, almost all of us feeling strange without our older kids with us! It was great to get out, but for some reason there were so many mosquitos and we all started to go a little crazy and left early. I've never had that happen to me at the gardens before!

 Monday night we met up with the Kearls and the Webbs at Cowabunga Bay. We'd been meaning to all summer and finally made it happen, and even with the husbands! These kids don't see each other often enough but always have fun together when they do:

 And the last picture of the month is this little cutie finding things to do without her sisters. She played in the sprinklers and found things to pick in the garden (and had an obsession with tattoos for a while) -