Happy ninth, sweet girl

More cool artwork from Spencer

House progress! Eeeee! Painting is well on its way plus cabinets are in and shelves in closets. And the outside is coming along.

Happy first day of kindergarten for Chloe! She is so cute and loves it. She just wishes she could go all day like everyone else, but unfortunately our district does half-day kindergarten. So I'm commuting kids back and forth two and a half hours a day for two and a half more weeks. It's pretty insane for me, but I'm so glad the kids like their new school. 

Fridays the kids get out early. So I pick Chloe up at 10:55 and then have to get the others at 1:00. It's a 25-min drive each way to our house so that makes no sense to go home. So for the new few week Fridays are going to be shopping days in between school pickups. Chloe and I hit up Costco last Friday and grabbed some pizza for lunch. Fun times!

Happy ninth birthday, Genevieve! Her teacher gave her this cute cup filled with treats. 

Opening presents.

This is a cat stuffie that I ordered online and I was so amused how it shipped. 

It's much better once the shrink wrap was off. 

My kids have a cat obsession. We've promised them we'll get a real one in a few months after we're settled in, but for now they're pretending all their cat stuffies are real. 

Genevieve won her first soccer game of the season the morning of her birthday. Yay! This is actually Spencer's team, since I was at his game and Bill at Genevieve's. 

She got some legos and assembled them immediately. This is part of the kit. 

She wanted a white cake with blue frosting and a green gecko on top. And she wanted to draw the top herself, which was fine by. me. I made the cake from scratch, which was delicious by the way, and frosted it and she did the green. 

She said it needed palm fronds and a few snakes too. Haha! I love her creativity. 

We had a pool party at our cousin's pool to celebrate. Pizza and swimming and cake made for a great little evening. 

And Chloe is always picking out the most interesting outfits she thinks match. I love her creativity. 

Another Chloe make believe moment. 

first day of school and birthdays galore

 We had a GREAT first week of school! Aside from adding two plus hours of commuting a day to my schedule, it's really awesome to have the kids in their new school where I expect them to be able to stay for the foreseeable future. No expectation of moving in a year to a house or finishing grad school or whatever else has happened at the previous three elementary schools they've gone to. It's such a nice, new phase to be in. And we're three and a half weeks out from closing on our house too, at which point we'll be walking to school, so the excitement is real. 

Fifth Grade.

Fourth Grade.

Second Grade.

Kindergarten.

And just in case we have Covid cases go crazy like my friends back east have been seeing their first few weeks of school, I made a couple new masks for each kid. Two aren't pictured. Here's hoping they don't even need them, but if they do, at least they have fresh ones to use. I'm feeling a big silver lining for my particular family post our Covid July. We are about as protected from getting Covid as it's possible to be for the next at least 90 days and if things go as I hope, the kids will have a vaccine available before they are in danger of being infected again. This is huge for feeling less anxious about this school year. 

It poured for two straight days here in Salt Lake last week. It was so cold for August and in all the 13 years I've lived in Utah I've never seen anything like the longevity of this storm. The air quality was absolutely horrendous during it because of the storm blowing the smoke over from California, but now this week we have fresh, clean air and it's so lovely. 

This is from last week. Today I drove by our house and they're starting putting the siding and brick on. Eeeeeee! They're painting inside this week. 

We took an absolute whirlwind trip down to Las Vegas on Saturday. Bill's grandpa turned 90 and we were off and on whether we would be able to have a party for him, but in the end we did a scaled back version of what had been planned and it was so great. We actually cancelled our original hotel booking and they were just really expensive when we looked again, so instead we left at 4:15AM Saturday morning and drove down, arriving before 10AM Las Vegas time. We got to swim in the grandparent's hotel pool and we got to go visit one on one with Grandpa at his house, and then later in the afternoon we had a dinner out at a Brazilian grill. It was so good. We hopped in the car after and drove back home, arriving just before midnight. It was surprisingly not stressful and totally felt worth it. We saw three of Bill's siblings and some nieces and nephews and it's just great to be with family. Totally worth it. 

And not to leave my family out, we had a family birthday party at my grandma's house to celebrate our July and August birthdays. We missed the July party because of our Covid adventure, as well as our family reunion with my family, so it had been a long time since we saw everyone. Genevieve and my nephew share the same birthday, so it's fun to get to celebrate together now while he's still in Utah finishing up college. Here's the birthday peeps. 

last day of summer vacation!

Genevieve did a fun activity day activity this week, learning how to face paint. 

We ordered a few Halloween costumes and the kids ran around in them. I've since gathered them up and we'll save them for Halloween. Aaron picked Thor. 

Spencer picked a FNAF character but it was basically painted on him so we returned it and haven't picked a new costume yet. Everything he wants has full masks, which doesn't work well for a lot of events. So we'll see what he ends up picking. 

Chloe picked Queen Elsa. We got one costume and the accessories broke within a day or two, so we returned it and this one came today. I let her wear the accessories today but gathered them up as well to make sure they last until Halloween. She loves it so much though. And she is sure to remind us that she is a queen, not a princess.

I guess I didn't snap a picture of Genevieve's costume yet, but she's going to be a medieval princess. Chloe is lording over her their relative statuses, lol. Genevieve has been reading a lot of Rick Riordan novels this summer so she's super into Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse mythology.

Chloe is always coming in to see me while I'm working wearing the most random mix of outfits. PJ dress, unicorn face mask, cowboy hat, back massager, cheese Christmas ornament. 

A drawing Spencer did. I'm in awe of his attention to detail. It's so fun to watch his skills develop.

We had quite the adventure Saturday. We went to Park City to go to the Olympic Park. We wanted to do the alpine slide and thought we had tickets to it. Turns out we didn't, they were tickets for a ropes course, which will also be fun when we get around to doing it. We went through the museum there and then went to do the course only to find out we needed closed toe shoes, which one kid didn't have. So we ran down to Walmart to get some, came back, only to discover they had sold out of one of the courses we wanted to do. Gah! Meanwhile, when we stepped out to go get the shoes, this had developed.

Yep, that's right, a fire had started literally 20 minutes, if that, after we had driven up I-80, due to a faulty catalytic converter on someone's car. It was raining ash on us at the Olympic Park. We decided it was better we weren't outside in that awful air trying to do a ropes course while it was developing. And lo and behold, as we left we discovered they had full blown closed I-80, so we had to drive down through Heber and then back up to Salt Lake City. Let's just say that was a LONG drive home. Not being one to waste an opportunity, we stopped at Granny's Drive-In in Heber for ice cream, which was delightful, then made it home just in time to get to a get together with my run club friends. It was a fabulous day, even considering the fire. 

Unfortunately that fire has caused the air quality to completely tank in the valley. It's been in the unhealthy for sensitive groups range ever since Saturday but also bumped into unhealthy for everyone pretty regularly. Here's hoping the fire can be contained soon. The latest I've heard is it is 21% contained.

Things that make me smile this week

Chloe's fabulous style, including swiping my glasses. 

Spencer eating taco salad. It's not a simple food per se, and he tends to like single-ingredient foods, so it's nice to see him eating more complex things. 

Costumes.

Reading at the table while eating. 

Kids' haircuts.

Reading on the hammock. 

Chloe's hair in a ponytail. Five years in the making! 

Genevieve hanging upside down until her face turned purple just so I could take a picture of it for her. 

Chloe watching her shows while sitting on our new exercise bike. 

Going running with my run club again after a month away. 

Chloe wearing toy handcuffs on a car ride for absolutely no reason except she found them and thought they were cool. 

So happy it's August!

 It feels so lovely to see that we've rolled over into a new month. July was a total wash for us besides Aaron's birthday. Covid consumed the second two-thirds of the month but we're finally free! I can't believe it but school starts in two weeks and our house is making progress. It's looking like it'll be done towards the end of September, which means a month of commuting the kids over to their schools three times a day, but also means it'll only be for a month. Huzzah!

This last week has thankfully also been much better than the middle of the month. Our 18 days of total quarantine ended finally on Wednesday and we took the kids to Cowabunga Bay to celebrate. It was so fun! We rode all the water slides and floated the lazy river and played in their pool and had just a delightful three and a half hours and then finished it off with Carl's Jr. Haven't been there in years and it was tasty! 

Then Friday morning I flew out with my mom and sister to Delaware to attend my niece's baptism. It was such a lovely trip! We had a great time flying out and back and went blueberry picking and at at some of their favorite food places and played with my cute nieces and nephews and my niece got baptized. Everything that could have gone wrong at the baptism did, including the font overflowing, missing clothing, a nervous 8 yr old, technical difficulties with Zoom. It was a little nuts, but she still ended up baptized and happy and really, that's the whole point, right? It was a wonderful weekend. 

And now it's August and it's time to get ready for school and life continues on. I feel refreshed and ready.