August 2016 (part 1)

Natalie braved the drive from Denver by herself with three kids (two of them being 10 month old twins!) so she could spend a week in Utah at the beginning of August. We had fun spending a lot of time at the Brower's with them. I have a few pictures but hardly any with Kaitlyn and the twins in them!

Natalie and Lorna helped the kids make some shaving cream paints:

 We went swimming at the country club. Beck and Olive:

This was the first day that Alta and Ellie used our snorkels and masks at the pool but it became a weekly thing. They would swim the length of the pool over and over again - I think it really helped them become stronger swimmers!

One of the days Natalie was here we had a crazy summer thunderstorm that turned into a hail storm:

 Making sugar cookies with Grandma is a favorite! They stayed outside to decorate them which made clean up a lot easier:

 Natalie and I took advantage of nap time and drove to the canyon with the older girls. We showed them the granite pieces with chisel marks from where they cut them to use for the Salt Lake Temple (which the girls had just learned about in primary so it was perfect timing!) and we explored the dry river bed and built rock towers:

 Mark and Lorna's air conditioning was not working (it was so so hot!) but got replaced during that week so Natalie used the box to build them a house. They each took a side and decorated it with paint and spent a lot of time playing in it:

 Mark and Lorna wanted to get a picture of all the kids sitting with them in the Porsche. These kids love getting rides around the neighborhood in Grandpa's car! It was pretty funny to see them all crammed in there. They got a real photo with their nice camera but I just snapped a phone picture:

We said goodbye to Natalie that night since she was driving home the next day.

That night Ellie also had a horrible bloody nose. I took a picture so I could remember - she doesn't get bloody noses that often, especially compared to Alta, but this one would just not stop. I was on my phone looking up every way to stop it and trying to decide at what point we should take her to an instacare! After more than an hour and a half we got it to stop and luckily it stayed stopped. Poor girl, it was so late at night and she kept telling us she just wanted to go to sleep!

Now on to random pictures I have from August. Sandy City has a hot air balloon festival every year, and every year I think about taking the girls since it's just down the street from us. But the thought of waking them up at 6 in the morning isn't very appealing. Instead Dan and I see them from our front yard while the girls are still asleep:

We have no intention of moving, but we like to explore different parts of Draper to see if we'd like living there. One evening we went on a walk, with the girls riding their bikes, to look around. It turned into the longest walk ever! But looking at this picture as I type this in January makes me miss those warm summer evening adventures:

This is the girls on a Sunday afternoon when we found a big snake in our yard. I only took a movie of the snake, not any pictures, but it was at least 3 feet long. We'd actually seen it a couple of times, it lived in our rock wall, but this was the first time I saw how big it actually was! Ellie will not go near the wall now.

 I had a major craving for peach-raspberry pie, yummm:

 Olive got a few bloody noses too! I guess she didn't escape that gene. They were always at night and for some reason they never woke her up (they were pretty light), so I would get her in the morning to find blood on her bed and smeared all over her face and she never had any idea:

I took the girls to the zoo again, and this time we got to see the seal trainers at work:

Apparently something was in the air in August because next it was my turn to have a bad nose bleed. And it was poorly timed too! Malorie and I had just gotten to the end of the trail (and the farthest point from my house) on our early morning bike ride when it started. Mal rode back so she could get her car and pick me up and I sat on the ground with blood pouring out of my nose. Yuck. I did get it to stop though and was able to ride home without being rescued.

I only went on a few more rides after that -my last bike ride was September 7th when I was 14 weeks along. My belly was just starting to get grow enough that it felt awkward to be on a bike and I thought I'd better call it quits for the season! I've missed biking, even though I wouldn't be riding in the winter anyway, but I'm glad this baby will come before spring so I can ride again.

My neighborhood friend Nicole invited some people to meet up at Silver Lake for a walk and a picnic a couple days before school started. The weather was perfect and the girls loved running around with friends.

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