Conversation

Every morning Bruce and I "talk" via text messaging while we get ourselves ready for the day ahead. Some of our conversations do not have an approved rating for all audiences. But here is this morning's conversation is safe for all eyes:




Me:  Did you know that when I wake up in the morning I always look over to see you?

Me:  I didn't realize it myself until lately.  You are not there when I look.

Bruce North:  I wish I was next to you right now.

[This last message came when I was already typing in the next one. Text messaging is not the most graceful way of communicating.]

Me:  I don't know how late the boys stayed up on the computers, despite my telling them to go to bed many times . . .

[And now that I've received Bruce's last message . . .]

Me: I WISH YOU WERE WITH ME TOO! (I had to put that in all caps because it's the important part of my ramblings.)

Bruce North:  :) I love you. You're cute.

[How could I not love a man who says I am cute? Again, that message came while I was already typing the next one.]

Me:  This morning one of those boys was awake @ 6:00! I heard him go into the bathroom & I thought, 'I have to get up & be your alarm clock every morning so you'll be 

Me: on time for school You are NOT getting up @ 6 a.m. to play on the computer!' (Grrrrr!)

Me: So I jumped out of bed & ran to the kitchen (in my underwear) while he was in the bathroom, so I could lock the computer.

Me:  Naturally, he got out of the bathroom while I was sitting @ the computer in my underwear.

Me:  Think he gets my message?

Bruce North:  Sorry. Your robe was behind the chair.  I don't know. I hope he gets it. Is Michael's [computer] locked?

[Now that my story is done, I can respond to the "cute" message.]

Me:  I LOVE YOU TOO BRUCE!

[In all caps, because it's important, right? And now I can reply to the latest question too.]

Me:  No, someone was already playing on Michael's computer.  Could be Michael.  Maybe I should have gone down there in my underwear to chew them out.

Me:  Maybe the added embarrassment would help . . .
except that if the computer is on they don't even look when I talk to them.

Me:  Gotta wake up the girls.

[The girls have school today at Entheos, even though the boys at Paradigm don't.]

Bruce North:  My mother in her underwear would put the fear of God in ME.

Me:  ;D
I know, right?

[Bahahahaha! I love my husband!]

Gingerbread House

On Sunday, November 30 Bishop Jeppson threw down the gauntlet: Our ward Christmas party was coming up on Friday, December 5 and there was going to be a gingerbread house contest! (And he may have said something like we wouldn't be able to beat him.) Well! Since we make a gingerbread house every year, we would just have to do ours that week and enter the contest too.

Unfortunately for our building project, that was the same week that Brandon's school musical was running. He played Lazar Wolf in Fiddler on the Roof, and I had to run him up town to the theater and back home again, Monday through Thursday night that week. But the play was fun, and Brandon did an awesome job!!

"The papas!" (Tradition)

Lazar Wolf speaks to Tevye about Tzeitle 

"A milk cow?! So I won't be lonely?"

To Life

"Lazar Wolf, I have always wanted a son . . . but I wanted one a little younger than myself!"

"He shamed me in front of the whole village!"

It seems like I was doing a bunch of other stuff that week too, but I can't remember what. Anyway, what that meant was that we didn't even get to start on the house until Friday morning. So, naturally, I kept all my kids home from school that day because, yes, I am the kind of mother who keeps her kids home from school all day to build a gingerbread house. And it was going to be done no later than 5:30 that evening so we could enter it in the contest because, yes, I am a little competitive.

But first I had to take Kaylie to the orthodontist that morning and we didn't get home until 10:40, and I still had to finish drawing the house patterns. At 11:45-ish we were finally putting the first pieces into the oven to bake; we didn't finish baking the house until 3:30—only two hours to pour the windows, build and decorate our house! Aaaaaagh!

cutting out the windows

pouring hard-candy syrup in the decorated windows
(I was told we almost got disqualified because they thought the windows were plastic—the entire house had to be edible.)

the girls dip pretzel sticks—which we ended up not using
(except for one)

Rachel makes frosting glue

I finished building the house and the girls got some minimal decorating done by 5:37. Just in time to rush to the party (which started at 6:00).

Jessica, with our entry

Yes, it was the biggest house—standing next to the smallest houses entered. (Ours was actually not my favorite house in the contest; I voted for another one.)

This . . .

. . . and this is what we came home to after the party.

But we won the "People's Choice" award!
(I think it's the fancy windows that did it.
And maybe the super-cute snowmen.)

But that is not the end of the gingerbread house story. Nope.
We still wanted to really decorate our house.

Rachel begins by covering a big crack in the wall.

While the girls decorated the house, Ryan and I worked on something else. Can you tell what it is?

And here's the finished house:

Yay!

Didn't they do a nice job?

2014 Wish List

I am late coming out with my Christmas List—honestly, I haven't given it much thought this year. Which is probably OK, since I'm pretty sure Santa saves my list for the last three days of preparation before Christmas. Anyway, here, once again, is my infamous Wish List:

La Campanella (sheet music) by Franz Liszt. You can listen to it here. And I bet you can print it yourself for free (which, yes, means that I could too, but what's the fun in that?).

While we're talking about sheet music, I didn't get the music for Milonga Sureña by Juan Jose Ramos last year, and it really is cool and I'd like to learn it. You can listen to that one here. (In fact, this one might be the cooler piece, in my opinion—such awesome rhythm!)

If I get either of these sheet musics I promise I will practice the piano again! But maybe especially Milonga Sureña.

Clothes are always a given—a dress, some nice tops, maybe some shoes . . .

A CAMERA! My life is so sad without my camera! I bought a used one from the want-ads (ksl.com), but it's not as nice as the one that disappeared.


Hmmm. I really can't think of anything else. There are things I need—like getting the timing fixed on my sewing machine, and things I could use—like getting some business cards printed. But that just doesn't sound fun or Christmas-y. So Santa should be pleased to see that I have a very short list this year.

And, in case you were wondering, I have been a very, very good girl!

Sad

It has been a month, to the day, since I last posted anything on my blog. Maybe because my life has become a bore.  It's not that I'm not doing things, or not busy. Actually I've been very busy. Over the last month I have patterned and made an entire wedding dress (photos later, when I get them), and I altered another wedding dress (hemmed it and replaced the bodice––and I'm waiting for pics of that one too). Now I'm working on Santa's coat, and then more sewing for Santa (to help out his elves––Christmas is coming fast!).  On top of that, I'm still trying to run my house––at least enough to keep us all alive.

But I'm running the house without my second half. Bruce has been teaching school in Vernal, 176 miles away, since August 11. You might wonder why he took a teaching job in Vernal instead of Salt Lake. Good question.  Bruce doesn't have a full teaching license, but because he does have a bachelor's degree he qualified for Utah state's Alternate Route to Licensure (ARL) program. This gives him a temporary teaching license so he can have a full-time teaching job while he goes to school to take the extra classes he needs to get the full certificate. He has two years (from the time he got the teaching job) to finish his license.  But the school districts here in the Salt Lake Valley absolutely will not hire an ARL teacher. So he applied in other districts in the state, and Uintah School District (Vernal) snatched him up. (He got a glowing recommendation from one of the principals he subbed for last year––because he is an awesome teacher!)

This is Mr. North's school picture for Maeser Elementary School. He is teaching 5th grade, and is a very popular teacher. :-)

At first we thought he'd find us a place to live out there and we'd all move. Instead he found that a one-bedroom apartment costs almost the same as our current house payment. (Fortunately Bruce found a very kind family who have taken him in as part of their family––rent free. He's become very good friends with them.) See, the oil fields in Vernal are booming right now and even an entry-level truck driver makes 1 1/2 times what a school teacher does. So housing prices have shot up (almost double what they are in Salt Lake, and triple what we still owe on our house), and the demand is high. In short, we can't compete.

I had considered this possibility when Bruce drove away that first day in August. I thought that he might have to finish his teaching certificate in Vernal while we lived here without him for two years, seeing him only on the weekends. And I knew it would be hard, but I believed that it would get easier as time went by; never fun, by any means, but more bearable with time.In fact, what has actually happened is that it gets harder and harder for me to send him away each week. During the weeks I have to take care of things like kidney stones, oral surgery, installing a dishwasher, the van completely breaking down (completely––not worth paying for more repairs), kids running six different directions, and managing the house all by myself. On the weekends I only see Bruce for 14 to 20 hours (waking hours); it's not enough. It's not enough time for him to do the things that I can't do myself, and spend time with the kids, and not nearly enough time for me. I am lonely.

And, consequently, I can't think of anything interesting to write about. Aaawwww! Pretty sad, huh? It makes me feel babyish just to write this. Especially when I have so many things to be grateful for—like Bruce's job, and his dad helping me out so much while Bruce is gone, and my really nice kids.
But I miss my husband desperately.

A Trip to the Oral Surgeon

As I was saying last night, before I was so rudely interrupted by pain-killer sickness . . .

Two-and-a-half weeks ago I went to the dentist for the first time in about seven years. This is not because I am so terrified of the dentist that I avoided going until my mouth was falling apart. Actually it was lack of insurance and the tremendous cost of dentistry that kept me away, but the result was the same.

A few years ago my back left tooth broke. Seriously—a chunk the size of one of my kids' baby teeth broke off. I was pretty stressed out about it at first, but it never hurt, and I mostly didn't think about it after a while.

Then, during my last semester in school, my lower left gum got a black spot ("It's the black spot!") and a big, old boil on it, and my third tooth got kind of wiggly. I was pretty sure this meant an abscess, so I looked it up online—even found pictures that looked just like what I had—and yes, I was right. This wasn't terribly surprising, because that tooth has given me trouble since before I had my braces, and has had three surgeries during it's little life. But I couldn't get it fixed yet.

So I had Bruce give me a blessing and I did a few things I knew from having my jaw surgery way back when, and hoped nothing terrible would happen. After a while the blister popped (while I was brushing my teeth) and a bunch of goo leaked out. This happened every other day for a couple of weeks, until the bubble just went away, my gums looked mostly normal, and the tooth mostly stopped wiggling. Which was good, because I was in the middle of my fashion-show craziness, and didn't have the time or money to deal with it just then.

So the green arrows point to the little wires that held my jaw in place after my jaw surgery (when I was 16). I drew black outlines around the teeth on the left side to make it easier to see where all the happiness was taking place. You can see that the naughty, bad tooth has never had a normal root like the others. The tiny white spot on the bottom of that tooth is where I had two "root canals" done. (Actually the dentist says that tooth never had a root canal—which makes sense since that tooth has no root to speak of. But after my second surgery on it I got a T-shirt that said "I survived root canal surgery!" So it must have been a similar procedure.)

Well now we have some insurance—a "health savings account" actually. So I finally went to the dentist. Yay! I told him that I had a slightly wiggly tooth, he looked at my x-ray and said, "I bet I know which one." Yes, I had an abscess and some infection in there. But before we dealt with that he wanted to put a filling in the broken tooth. So two weeks ago, Wednesday, they shot me up with ten shots of novacaine and not only filled that tooth, but built it up so it doesn't look broken any more. Coming off of the novacaine was miserable. (I've decided that since I never have any drugs stronger than two over-the-counter ibuprofen in my system (and even that's not very often), my body just can't handle anything stronger.)

For two weeks I had a low-level ache in my head and jaw that gradually dwindled as time passed. The dentist looked at that tooth again yesterday, and it turns out the new bit needed to be ground down a little so my bite would work right.

After that was done, I went in to the oral surgeon where I would be put to sleep and have my naughty, bad, abscessed tooth removed and my mouth prepared for an implant. Again, I'm not scared of that kind of thing, but I am scared of getting a needle stuck in me–which was the very first thing they did; they gave me an I.V. to deliver the sleep-inducing drugs. I was a very good girl, and did not cry, or wriggle or anything. They said I'd feel drowsy in about 40 seconds, and I guess they were right because the next thing I remember was my father-in-law helping me into his car. (After he took me home he picked up my prescriptions and brought me some flowers too. :-) )

These are not my flowers because my camera is still missing; but they are like my flowers.

The worst of it all was coming off of the drugs and being on the pain-killers yesterday. Severe dizziness and nausea every time I tried to stand or sit up! That, and being super hungry (which increased the dizziness and nausea). Today my mouth hardly knows anything different happened (except my tongue can feel there's an empty spot that hasn't been there since I was twelve), so I will avoid the pain medicine like the plague that it is. And in a few months I will go back for a crown and my teeth will be better than they have in a while.

Hooray for modern dentistry!

X-Rays Are Cool!

Having your mouth worked on . . . not so much.

And I will have to try this later, because I'm feeling very dizzy and nauseous all of a sudden.

Silly

Do you ever, sometimes, have a perfectly good day—get a lot done, feel pretty happy, enjoy your family—and then, just before bedtime you feel completely let down and have to cry?

And then do you wake up the next morning still feeling out of sorts and wanting to cry? And then you get lost and stuck in road construction for an hour trying to find an address and then make your way back home? And then you have to go to the dentist and get a tooth filled?

I'm not afraid of the dentist or dental procedures; I never have been (unless I was too little to remember). I had so many things done to my mouth in the first twenty to thirty years of my life that it's kind of hard to scare me off now. So I don't think it was the actual visit to the dentist—or the anticipation of it—that's caused this sadness. And, as expected, everything went fine. They gave me a half dozen shots to numb my mouth and later, when I could still feel my chin, they gave me another three (which I felt). The work on my tooth went fine (didn't feel any of that!) and now I'm home—albeit with a totally numb mouth. Standard. Painless.

Nevertheless I feel pretty sad.

I want to be consoled.

For what?

I don't know.

Maybe it's just knowing that no one is going to give me a hug, listen to my experience (mundane as it was) and tell me what a brave girl I am.

Silly.


And (by the way) my camera is still lost. I think it's a hopeless cause. Maybe that's the trouble.

Hair Day

I don't know yet if it's a good hair day, or a bad hair day; I just colored my hair and it's not dry yet. Me dyeing my hair is nothing new; I've colored it a lot. It's had blonde highlights, it's been red, it's been brown. But for several years now it's mostly been red—it would have saved me a lot of trouble if I'd just been born with red hair, because I love it!

I was born a blondie.
(Check out the cool car in the neighbor's driveway!)

This is close to what it looked like until I was probably ten or so. (It's a little reddish-looking because it's an old picture.)

This fabulous picture, apparently taken when I was half-dead first thing in the morning, shows my real hair color by the time I was a teenager. (I bet this was Christmas morning.)

And this is about when I first started coloring my hair—at Wendell's prompting.

Lately I've been thinking that it would save me a lot of trouble if I'd just go back to my own, real hair color—no more dyeing. (Although I am getting a few gray strands, and I'm not ready to go there yet. So I might still keep playing with the color.) Anyway, while I was at the store yesterday with Brandon and Ryan I told them to help me choose a color that was close to my real hair color. Brandon (age 16) says, "I have no idea what your real hair color is." Ryan (age 15) agreed. So I told them to look at the two to three inches of new growth since the last time I colored; that is the real color. My nice teenage boys humored me and we picked "medium rich brown."

And this morning I did it; medium rich brown all over my hair. I even dyed my eyebrows because . . . why not? I just finished showering after doing the whole hair-color process. It looks dark! Which means I may have come fairly close the the truth here. I'll have a pretty good idea when it's dry.

Sadly my camera is still missing! I have this picture in my mind's eye of it being about a foot down, right in the middle of the kitchen trash that went out four weeks ago. Oh man! I really hope not! But this means you'll have to wait and see my "new" hair color in person. So did I have a good hair day or a bad one? We'll see.

Chaos!

I wanted to post pictures with this blog, but I can't because my camera is lost in all the chaos of redecorating. My house already looks like it's been ransacked, so it hasn't helped me much to ransack the house in search of the camera. :-(

But I'll tell you what I'm doing anyway.

First of all I had this wonderful idea that I should paint the railings in my house black instead of white. It was a really good idea, because it looks amazing. Unfortunately I also had the idea that spray-painting them would be cheaper and easier than using a brush. Not only that, but since it would be very difficult to remove the rails, I decided to do it while they were still in place—right smack between my kitchen and living room. I will tell you right now that a person who decides to spray paint anything in the middle of the house is a dork and should probably be shunned. OR maybe they are a dork and should be pitied and helped in any way possible.

Anyway, I draped the living room off with lots of plastic sheeting and began spraying from the kitchen side of the world. And guess what I did? I didn't even think to turn off the fan blowing from the hallway. So one can of paint later I had 90% of one side of the rail painted, and all the paint that dried in the air settled all over my entire kitchen. Clean up took about an hour.

The next day I got marginally smarter—just a little—and bought more plastic and was more careful in my draping, and turned the fan off. Two cans of paint later I still had a lot more to finish. On the third day I did amazing things with that plastic sheeting (I really got to be an expert in draping off the house) and used up another one-and-a-half cans of paint to finish the rails. Finally. Except the next day I found some spots that were missed. Urrrgh!  Was it cheaper? No. $19 for the spray paint and $15 for the plastic; a can of paint would have been about $5, and a sponge brush is only about 50 cents. Was it easier or faster? No! I wouldn't have had to do so much draping, and it probably would have only taken one day if I'd brushed it on. Does it look fantastic? Well, yes. It does.

Once that was all finished, I cut the pieces for the kitchen floor (a full day's work) and put them in. It looks all right—too bad I can't show you a picture. :-(

Then I was ready to start on the kitchen counters. But before I could do that I had to fix some leaks under the sink and in the faucet. It turns out that I'm no good at plumbing; everything I touched broke. So I called my brother Gregory and he fixed the faucet and the shut-off valve that I broke. Unfortunately the next day there was still some leaking, but Greg was at work so I called my father-in-law and he fixed it. Yay! Now I could get to work on the counters.

Day One: The first thing I did was remove the kitchen sink. (Since there's no photo, you will have to imagine a big hole where the sink should be.) This gave me major deja vu, even though I've never removed a sink before. Next I finished sanding and washing the counters, and finally I could put down the black primer.

Day Two: Today was painting day! I sponged and painted on my counter colors and, I have to say, it looked pretty darn good.

Day Three:  Top coat. Twice. And I am done with the Giani products.

Now I had to decide whether to use marine spar varnish over the whole thing. I'd read a few countertop finishing sites and blogs that said this was a good idea. Marine spar is supposed to be fairly heat-proof and, obviously, waterproof, and very tough. After discussing with Bruce, I decided to do it. Now the one blog that really persuaded me to use the marine spar said that the varnish was thick, "like honey," and needed 24 hours of cure time between coats. What it didn't say was that it has a yellowish tint, but I'm OK with the color; instead of whites I have golds. Not exactly what I had in mind, but it still looks good.

It also didn't say that it's impossible to put the varnish on without leaving brush strokes behind. That's not so OK. I did my absolute best to not leave brush strokes, but . . .

After four days of curing (and an entire week with no kitchen sink), yesterday I still had to put on another coat of spar varnish, and I was feeling pretty irritated about the brush strokes. So I got online and started looking up tips on marine spar. And guess what? All the woodworking people (not the cute little moms who paint their counters) say that you need to thin the varnish by 15% with mineral oil if you want to brush it on smoothly. And also that, once cured, it's nearly impossible to sand out the brush strokes—and yes, they need to be sanded out. Well, that would have been nice to know. I sanded and sanded and sanded and got nowhere. So, in irritation, I slapped on a much-too-thick final coat. This means it's going to take longer to cure. Arrrgh! 

Well, besides having no kitchen sink, and not being able to use the dishwasher (and washing dishes in the bathtub for a week—rednecks!), everything that I normally keep on the counters is on the kitchen table. So are the rice-cooker, the electric frying pan and the crockpot—my current cooking devices because the stove is also pulled out of place and sort of out of commission while this project is in force. The dirty dishes are piling up on the table too, hidden amongst everything else. I can't really put anything back on the counters until they are completely cured, and who really knows when that will be? My big plan is to bring a card table into the kitchen and put all the extra stuff on that so we can use the kitchen table again. I'm thinking this will last one or two months, just to be safe. But I will go ahead and re-install the sink, probably tomorrow, because it's getting kind of ridiculous. (By the way, removing the sink was probably the easiest, quickest part of this entire project. I anticipate that replacing it will be equally simple. I hope.)

Oh, and did I say that the ceiling fan/light has been removed? I was taking down the fan blades so I could clean them and Bruce thought that would be a good time to hang the fan correctly. It's been loose since we moved in, and every time the kids run the fan I'm pretty sure it will fall down on someone, chop off their head, and smash their brains in all at the same time. So fixing it is a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, Bruce couldn't finish that project before he had to go out of town this week, so here I am with only a half-lit kitchen and the light fixture/fan sitting on the living room floor. (I'm not a plumber; not an electrician.)

On top of all that, my peaches are ripe and falling all over the ground. Seriously, we've probably lost more than 200 peaches. So this week I've been picking peaches and then going to Melanie's house to do my canning.

So, yeah. We are in utter. complete. chaos. And my camera's lost.

In Busy-ness

I have had lots to write about the last few weeks, but it's not necessarily stuff I'm ready to write about. So instead I'll talk about my latest projects.

You might think I'd have put out a shingle and my new projects would be all about sewing. But if you thought that, you might be wrong. I have been asked to make a wedding dress, four sets of Raggedy Ann & Andy's, and a Santa Claus coat, but those are not the biggest projects around here right now; they are still in negotiation.

No, actually there's a good possibility that we will be moving. Bruce is looking at a job in Vernal, Utah—a 3 1/2 hour drive from here. Commuting is out. of. the question. So he's gone up there frequently on business trips and has done some house-hunting as well. The trouble is that there's a lot of work available in the oil-fields in the Uintah Basin right now; this means that there's an influx of people working and making some good money, and they have made housing scarce and expensive. Plus we are looking for a house that fits eight to ten people and our budget.

Something on the floor is really funny. I wonder what it was?

The other trouble is that we would have to sell our house here in West Valley City. I don't know what the housing market is like here, but school has started and winter is on the way. So I don't know . . .
And I have to get the house looking presentable. So a lot of projects that "can wait until later" suddenly can't really wait until later. And those are the projects I'm talking about.

First of all, I'm re-resurfacing the kitchen counters. The finish has chipped and peeled away again, in places, so I contacted the company; they stand by their product; I'll give them that. They are sending me another free kit to redo the counters.

Oh, look! My new counters arrived today!
I've got to say, this company has amazing customer service.

Last week, while I waited for the kit to arrive I worked on stripping all the old surfacing off.

You can see from the "before" picture that my house was built in the late 80's. Mauve countertops?

the gradual deterioration of my "granite" counters

I'm also finishing the kitchen floor. When we bought the house we left a couple of unfinished places on the kitchen floor—one is under the railing because we were going to do wood-railing and have a nice . . . hm. Not sure what the real name is . . . a pretty board that borders the floor and sits under the railing.

And we left another bare spot where a smaller railing was supposed to be, but then we decided that was a stupid place for a rail and never even put it back up. (This is why we had the top step re-done with all of the remodeling.) After a little thought (several years ago, actually) I figured out how to finish it beautifully. Well, last week I went to Lowe's and saw some flooring on a 75%-off clearance; talk about good timing!

So last Saturday Bruce and I (mostly Bruce) worked on the floor.

See how helpful I am?
(By the way, I really like this man. A lot!)

Bruce cuts the edges of the floor into a smooth, straight line. He's using the level, screwed to the floor, as a rip-fence.

And here he is, prying that front facing off. But why? ;-)

And here is the floor, all cut out (with straight edges) and ready to go. You'd think that that corner was square, but it's not—which makes things a little more difficult. And it's not our fault either. That would be the fault of the people who originally built this house at the speed of light.

And I did some more work on the counters.

I found it was lots easier to sand the counters if I could put my full body-weight into the job.

I have reached the conclusion that the finish really should work as well as they say, because there are spots that I can't even remove with an electric sander and 60-grit sandpaper! The question is, why does it stick in some places, but not others? And how can I prep the counters so that the finish will stick everywhere?

Once the floor and counters are done  I want to paint the living room and kitchen—another project I've been wanting to do for ages. And I'm going to touch-up some of the paint on the black cabinets. When the house is ready to show, it should look just the way I want it to so that I can live here forever. That just figures! If it sells, then I can start over with a new house. If we can find one to live in.

Anyway, that's what I'm up to these days. I'll show pics as I finish each project.

An Afternoon in the Park

We are not much of an outdoor family. Especially in the summer. Then we just stay inside, trying to escape some of the heat. But when it rains . . .

Brandon had been listlessly watching TV. When it started raining hard he said he was going to go out. It didn't take much convincing to get the girls to go out too. We all splashed around in the deep water in the gutters, and walked along in the rain. Then the kids all decided to sit down and block the flow of water in the gutter. (That's when I thought of the camera.) They all sat there for a minute or so, then Brandon opened his floodgate and let the water flow to Jessica.

Jessica let the water out on Rachel.

Rachel let the water go to Kaylie . . .

And I was waiting at the end to take advantage of all that water.
(Ryan took some pictures and then went back to play on the computer. Boooo!)

Then the kids started running along the non-level sidewalk at the neighborhood park.

The girls went to play on the playground.

And when we are all nice and cooled down (actually I was cold!), we went back home again.

I love rainy days!