The new blogger format puts the pics in reverse order....
Hmmmm....
We love these big, beautiful sunflowers
that one of our neighbors planted.
We tried to plant sunflowers this year, too.
They failed.
Most weeks, we've been heading to April and Ben's house
to swim at the lake with friends.
It has been SO great to have some real-life
social interactions!
This month, the kids found this TEENY TINY TURTLE.
Is it the cutest thing you've ever seen???
Love it.
I signed Caroline up to take tennis clinics at Grandover.
Hooray! I'm so happy she's up for it.
You can just drop in when you want.
Clinics are held four afternoons a week.
C will probably go once or twice.
Her first week there, she got one-on-one
instruction from Nico for an hour and a half.
What? That's awesome!
She was exhausted at the end, but liked it.
When we drive home from clinic,
we drive through a really pretty part of town
that I love.
One of the afternoons, we crossed paths with this deer family,
Whitney cut her hair!
She was ready for a change.
And now that she's not dancing anymore,
she doesn't have to worry about putting it up in a bun.
It looks so cute.
That was A LOT of hair chopped off!
We've LOVED having our little hummingbird feeder this summer. It took several weeks for any birds to find it, but then we had a male bird that would come every day. He was very skittish and would just zip in and out for nectar. In August, we started getting females at the feeder. They would sometimes land and hang out for a bit. We never had two drinking at the same time, but would sometimes see two girls fighting in the backyard. Or one zip in right as the other one was leaving. I think they have started migrating south, because we haven't seen any for the past few days. We will miss them!
We re-potted Caroline's succulents.
They look so pretty!
She got six for her birthday and five
of them are still living. Pretty good!
As of now, church is still just shortened sacrament meeting.
Oh, and we have in-person youth meetings up to twice a month.
The girls and I are getting used to the "new normal" of masks and
distancing. The girls are enjoying it more as time has passed.
Church starts for us at 1 pm now.
Since we have time in the mornings, I
sometimes straighten Caroline's hair.
Look how long and pretty it is!
She looks so teen-ager-ish.
I love our washer and dryer. We bought them for a hundred dollars each when we bought our first house in 2003. They have been amazing! In those seventeen years, I had to have the dryer belt replaced ONCE and the washer NEVER needed service. Isn't that amazing?
Well, the streak has come to an end. So sad.
The washer stopped draining.
I had texted my appliance repair guy,
but he wouldn't text or call me back,
so I took to YouTube.
Emptied out the water.
Took off the front
Removed the drain pump
FOUND a little no-show sock lodged in there.
(THAT is apparently why they tell you NOT
to over-fill your washing machine...)
Removed it with some needle-nose pliers.
Voila! A drained washing machine.
Yippee!!!
I've never been so happy to see an
empty washing machine.
Whitney made us mint meringues for the
FHE treat. They were so tasty.
Ummmm....I think that's blood on our
Amazon box... Creepy.
More hummingbird pics
Care Bear at the lake,
waiting for friends to join us.
Before C signed up for clinics,
she and Piper signed up for a week-long
program called TryTennis at Pinetop.
Both girls liked it and I was SOOOO
happy to see that Care Bear enjoyed it
and might be willing to learn more.
I would LOVE to have another
tennis buddy in the family!
After church one Sunday.
I bought this cute terrarium for C
to add to her plant collection.
It came with cute glow-in-the-dark stickers.
But it never grew.
Lame.
Care Bear is getting better on the unicycle!
And Whit has started learning, too.
It's hard, but they're progressing.
We spent more time in the mountains this summer
than we have ever have before.
They're a great place for social distancing and
escaping the heat and humidity.
This mountain behind us is called Buffalo Mountain,
in southern Virginia.
They have ZIPLINES there.
The girls and I decided to try them out on one of our day trips!
(Andrew's not at all interested in zip lines, so he was
happy to sit this one out.)
Look at the pretty surroundings!
This was Miss Whit's first time ziplining.
She was a fan.
Our guide showed us this hummingbird
nest that he had found earlier in the week.
Caroline and I had zip-lined in South Dakota together.
And I went one other time with B near home.
All of us had a BLAST.
At the end of the course,
we got to ride in a safari-type ride through
the forest back to our car.
Pretty sunset because I can't resist taking pics,
even though they never turn out as pretty as they actually are.
Brandon was homeless and lived out of his car for three weeks this month.
He's so adventurous.
Overall, he really liked the experience. He said he forced him to be more social rather than just hiding away in his room. And he obviously liked not having to pay rent for those three weeks! But he REALLY missed not having Wi-fi at night. And he said it was embarrassing to have to actually tell people that he was homeless.
Somehow in the midst of his homelessness,
he befriended a stray cat that he and his co-worker
claimed as their own.
I haven't heard an update on that cat lately....
I talked Andrew into playing on a mixed doubles
team with me this summer. Hooray!
Unfortunately, I didn't realize it was on the same
night as my summer singles league. Boo.
So, we only got to play in three matches together.
This was Andrew's first time playing competitively
since 2017. When he had his shoulder surgeries in 2018,
we thought he'd be back on the courts that summer,
but it didn't work out that way.
We won our first match pretty easily, 6-1, 7-6. Yay!
We lost our second match 6-7, 4-6. It was SO close.
And we pulled out a super close win in our third match,
4-6, 6-3, 1-0. So fun!
We got new carpet in our front room and dining room.
I LOVE it!
I got the cushiest kind and I could find.
It was expensive and totally worth it.
The piano room is the only room where
we spend time hanging out on the carpet,
so we are all enjoying it.
We made a quick trip to the science center
as one of our day trips.
We aren't members there anymore and
it is expensive to visit.
But we sure had a great time.
New komodo dragon exhibit
Baby Asian Fishing Cats.
So cute.
We found Gojira,
one of the penguins that C and I got
to interact with a year or two ago.
The tropical tanks made me miss snorkeling so much.
C and I love the garden eels.
The octopus was really active while we were there.
Love the golden lion tamarins
And these spotted rays are awesome, too.
They opened a new gas station nearby.
I hope they were just testing the sign...
doubt they'll get many customers at $6.56/gallon
Before the new carpet was installed,
the girls got to paint on the old.
I got Snapchat recently so I could communicate
more easily with Brandon. He responds better to Snaps
than any other platform I've tried.
We had fun trying out some of the Snapchat filters.
I wish I had captured the belly laughs that
we were having over these pics.
Baby Caroline.
It hasn't been that long since
she looked like this.
Baby Whitney
Baby Andrea
Baby Andrew is the cutest!
Fancy tropical girls
Our garden was so lame this year.
I think I got three cherry tomatoes out of it.
Boo.
I found myself on Ancesty!
Weird shadow sunset thing
Our neighborhood tennis courts got shut down. Booooo! Now we have to just randomly try to find courts that are open so we can play. One night we had planned a tennis date night, but all of the courts were full. We waited around for a bit, but all of the courts seemed like they were there to stay for a while. So, Andrew and I went back downtown to try to find a few more scavenger hunt places.
Explored a really cool community garden.
And some neat bridges, too.
The girls also went back to school in August. Our district is fully online. It feels so strange to still have them home all day every day. I didn't even take any back-to-school pics. It is going better than it did in the spring when everything got shut down. Whit has her first AP class, Environmental Science. It's a lot of work, which is good. Caroline has live meetings with three classes per day. She is online off-and-on from 9:30-2ish. Whitney has three or four classes a day from 9:30-2:30ish. Neither of them seem to have much homework outside of school hours.
We also signed Whitney up for voice lessons through the Music Academy of North Carolina. The classes are all virtual right now. She has taken two so far and feels like it will be an effective way to learn. I hope so!
