Summer wrap-up and School Start

The last few weeks of summer weren't boring. We had a huge rainstorm or two right at the first of August, which were really fun, but weren't good for all the repairs happening on our house. There had also been a handyman restoring some wood stuff on the back of the addition recently. He finished a few days before the big storm, but when it happened, the whole back addition started leaking like crazy! I was actually at the store when it happened, and when I walked in the door, water was streaming off the top of our built in storage cupboards under the window. And the older kids were there watching TV, and totally oblivious. Nothing much was ruined, but it was really a mess. I had to call the handyman that had done the work and ask "what the heck happened?" He had finished it that week! He said sometimes the sealant just doesn't seal, and promised to be there the next day to fix it. Slight eyeroll, but I'm grateful for that way-more-than-usual storm that pointed out the problem so impressively, because a slow leak from normal rain might not have been detected so easily. We haven't had any issue with it yet, thankfully. However, with that same rain, we also had a lot more leaking in the bathroom that we could see. We were thankful we hadn't had someone come to redo the drywall and texturing already! We might not have seen the leaking there, or it might have been ruined. Little blessings in disguise. The roof people came back to try again too, and decided maybe it was leaking around the drainpipe. Fun times!

At the same time as they were trying to work on our kids' bathroom, our toilet suddenly stopped working. The drain in the shower /toilet had been randomly backing up for months, but always worked itself out eventually. Not this time. At which time our other toilet was sitting out back, completely disconnected. More fun times! We ended up using the bathrooms over at the church a couple times that day, (thankfully Jeremy had a key) while two plumbers worked for like 5 hours. And they couldn't fix it. They put the other toilet back on for us to use over the weekend and had to come back Monday. But we had no shower during that time period. Thankfully Phil and Sophie were kind enough to let us shower at their house. It took another 6-8 hours (and a $1200 bill) and a bunch of different snakes and router things before they finally got it working again. They didn't know what the problem was, except maybe the cast iron plumbing had built up a lot of corrosion and things were getting stuck on their way through. They also discovered one of the copper pipes behind the toilet (they had opened up the wall to try to figure out what was up) basically fell apart when the pushed on it. Here's hoping if it has lots of friends, that they don't give up the ghost until after we're out of this house... Every once in a while the shower/toilet still backs up a little. I pray it continues to work itself out, because I don't want it to cost our landlady any more hundreds of dollars, and I don't want us to have to deal with it again!

The bathroom did eventually get drywalled, taped, and textured, and I spent a lot of a week (I'm not very fast, since I've never done it before) painting both bathrooms. It's not perfect, but it looks a whole lot better than it did, and it's so nice to have two working bathrooms.

School started on the 9th, which was a little crazy. Reilly is homeschooling again this year, and going to Eagleridge (a homeschool enrichment program) on Wednesdays. It's kind of nice to have him home for the most part, since it gives me a touch more flexiblity if I need to run somewhere for a few minutes while Bridget is asleep, or leave him and Shawn watching a movie for a bit while Bridget and I run somewhere. He loves Eagleridge and enjoys going there. The girls are still at Franklin and enjoying it. We have been lucky to get great teachers so far! (Shawn's sign lies - he hasn't actually been interested in almost any preschool work so far, though he already knows his alphabet and most of his numbers somehow...

And a few more pictures, just for fun.

The Rest of September

September was a super busy month. Shawn was super busy. He started getting into everything! He's getting the army crawling thing down, sitting up well finally, and starting to pull up to things and see the world in more of a three-dimensional place (instead of just the floor space). I put batteries in our Fisher Price chair (that was a 1st birthday present for Reilly, and is one of the few big toys we've moved all over the country with us. It's always a favorite!) and he is loving it. His other favorites are getting into the bottom drawers in the kitchen and swinging doors open and closed. The weather has been really pleasant for September, at least in the mornings, and Shawn and I have been getting out for some early morning walks.

In the first week of the month we got a ton of rain. Like record-breaking rain, that caused some major flooding. Our part in the excitement was limited (thankfully) to our store room getting kind of soggy on the bottom and to some of our windows leaking. Also, one or two ceiling leaks, but nothing very damaging. It took a while to get the roofing fixed though, because our HOA's roofing company was pretty busy with roofs that had caved in and such during the crazy storms. (It seems like there were two really big ones, just a week or two apart, so they were having a hard time catching up)

Oh! Another exciting thing that happened while we were in California was that Phil & Sophie's baby was born! Hudson Parker is a real cutie, and we were excited to meet him! Kinzi and Baiden came and played with us a couple times in the first week or two, and it was a little crazy having 4 kids 4-and-under, (we even made it to the mall...) but fun.

We've been getting much more regular about having our Family Home Evenings, and though sometimes they go more smoothly than others, it's nice that we're at least having them. It really helps that the kids are old enough that they know when it's Monday, and they ask all day what we're doing. Here are some pictures from a FHE in September. Shawn isn't as interested in what is going on and sometimes needs extra entertaining, especially since it's right before his bedtime and he's getting grumpy.

(leading the music)

Jeremy's MTC companion (who he's stayed in contact with pretty regularly over the last 10 years) finally got married this month! We were so excited for him (them) and I would have loved to have been there. If we hadn't just left the older kids for 4-5 days already (and recently done a long drive with Shawn that didn't go well) I would have tried to go too, but it's wasn't meant to happen. Jeremy had a great visit staying with our friends, the Frandsens (our neighbors at Palmer), and even got to see one of his mission presidents at the wedding. He had an awesome weekend, and a nice little vacation away from everything that he really needed.

Also, Reilly turned 8! Our stake does stake baptisms, which wouldn't be happening until October, which was a little weird, to have him 8, and not baptized yet, but he still had a good birthday. This was not a year for "friend" parties, so we celebrated by having dinner at Chili's, he went to a Diamondbacks game with Daddy and Grandpa, and then we made him a Ninjago cake. He also got this really cool Lego Chima set that Jeremy had found on clearance a month or two before. They were all excited about that one!
(Oh, and one of his favorite presents was also that we signed him up for a 6-week karate course, taught at the school once a week after school. He was very excited about that!)