Swimming, sliding, piping, fun!

The pool is closed, the summer list is off the wall, school is back in (almost) full swing, but someone forgot to tell mother nature that summer is winding down!  It has still been very hot around here, but I'm not complaining too much, I love the sunshine!

We spent most of August rounding out our summer list - we went to the Science and Nature museum, saw Brian Regan perform at Red Rocks (HILARIOUS!), and helped Kendra and Shad and family move to the Golden area (about 40 minutes from Parker).  Kip did most of the helping, I was probably just in the way a lot.

We went to the Colorado Scottish Festival and Highland Games - so fun! Massing of the bands:

 Tossing the caber:

 Face paint!

 Dancers!  Rachel especially loved all the dancers.  She was also excited that people "talked like Merida" (from Brave).

 And a random bird tent with a real live bald eagle you could pose with.  That's real!  if you look behind Rachel, you can see the trainer crouching down back there; the bird is on his glove.  (The scenery, on the other hand, is not real.  Just painted.)

They also had "Dogs of the British Isles," which we went back to more than once, the kids were having such a good time petting the doggies and begging me to take one home. (I did not give in.)  We visited many, many clan tents getting stamps from each to fill our clan passports, and had a great time.

The kids did their latest round of swim lessons.  Caleb and Ella are pretty much safe in the water now, (Caleb's been fine for a year or two, Ella was still a little flouder-ish), and Rachel got her first taste.  She did really well!   The last days of lessons, the kids got to go down the slide, and I was running the video camera to catch Rachel's first slide.  Make it full screen, watch until the end, look at her face - a little sad and a little funny. :)

If you can't tell, she was PETRIFIED, sobbing, hanging for dear life on to the railing.  Adorable right?!  I was giggling so hard but trying not to let her see. :)  Her teacher went up the stairs and rode down with her, so in the end she made it down alive.

 

 

Football, soccer, and volleyball started up again, everyone is having a great time with that. School has started but the teacher needs get her act together and stop trying to do things like paint the house and bottle an entire farm, we would get more school work done. :)

Labor Day Kip had off so we spent the day exploring Estes Park with Kendra's family and approximately 1.3 billion other people.  It was very pretty!  On the way home we stopped off at the pick-your-own farm that we found last year and rode around on the tractors picking tomatoes, peppers, onions, beets, carrots, corn, cabbage, and more.  So this week we bottled 30 pints of tomato soup, 10 quarts of spaghetti sauce, 18 pints of pickled beets, 17 pints of salsa, peeled and hung 36 onions, hung to dry 50 chiles, roasted a bunch more, made 9 pints of tomato sauce, and ate corn for dinner every night. :)  I sort of want to hug my canner, and also throw it over a cliff right now.  But I know we will enjoy that food all winter!