Swimming. We were up to lots of swimming. As much as I love being in Utah now, I really do miss our fabulous neighborhood pool we had in Texas.
Here’s Lizza helping out with some bread-making. I remember we were about to leave for our second stay at the hotel while our house got fixed up after the water heater disaster (see last post). So I was making lots and lots of bread to take with us:
That night the boys had a Court of Honor at the church. It felt weird to leave the church and go straight over to the hotel instead of home.
Hotel living. When I tried to look at the bright side, there were things that were not so bad about it. Like each kid having only one drawer for their clothes. I should do this in real life! It was so simple. Henry even thought it was fun to keep his drawer folded and organized.
Hotel breakfasts were definitely a plus for the kids.
Although Rachel and Lizza quickly realized they loved the unlimited fruit the best, and decided to skip the rest of the fancy breakfast stuff:
Playing card games in our hotel room:
Exciting snake incident. The first weekend we came back home to do laundry and pick up stuff we needed, and the boys noticed that our largish California King snake who lived in their room was not in her cage. Someone hadn’t secured the lid after her last feeding, and she was nowhere to be found. Even under normal circumstances this would have been alarming, but the state of our house made it worse – because of the repairs and painting being done, all the floors were covered with taped-down paper and plastic, and there were holes in the walls and ceilings. So really, just tons of hiding places for a snake. We searched and searched, and I started to worry that when it came time to sell the house we would have to tell the new owners there might be a snake hiding somewhere (we never would have sold! I’m trying to think now if I would buy a house under those circumstances, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t). Anyway, Tristan saved the day. He said a prayer, and then went to sit and think about where she could be. He said that all of a sudden he could see a picture of her in his mind next to a big bin with blankets in it. Which we happened to have in our food storage closet. So he went in there, and there she was.
Oliver turned 12 while we were staying at the hotel. The girls made him a super fancy birthday breakfast, which included waffle-sprinkle-strawberry layer cake.
After breakfast we drove back to the house to get Sunday clothes and presents.
And some good friends had us over for dinner and birthday brownies after church:
Various bedtime-at-the-hotel pictures:
And a typical lunch – grilled cheese sandwiches made from homemade bread and cheese slices/butter packets from the breakfast buffet. Everybody was tired of grilled cheese sandwiches by the end.
We went swimming a lot so we wouldn’t feel so cooped up at the hotel. The hotel had a pool, but it wasn’t as nice as the one in our neighborhood, so we spent a lot of afternoons driving home, getting some laundry started, and then heading over to the pool until dinner time.
Rachel invited a bunch of friends over to the pool for a late birthday party:
Trying out the pool at the hotel, just for fun. I can’t remember why we didn’t have the girls’ swimming suits with us.
Egyptian towel princesses. This is a thing they do whenever they encounter little hotel pool towels.
Trying to manage football practices and games while staying at the hotel was tricky. Here’s Henry before his first game. He had no idea what he was doing.
Oliver at one of his games.
First day of school. Still at the hotel. We had hoped to be back home by the time school started, but the house still wasn’t ready to move back in. So we had an adventurous first week of school:
Henry started kindergarten, which was exciting.
Eating breakfast in the hotel lobby with their backpacks on.
After Cindy and I dropped the kids off at school each day, instead of driving back to the hotel, we started going over to the house to work on projects, like painting all the doors before the new carpet got put in.
New carpet!
We also ran lots of errands during the day until it was time to pick up the kids from school and head back to the hotel and football practice. I could tell it was hard for Cindy to be a good sport when she never knew where we were going or when we’d be heading home, so on one particularly busy day, I grabbed a crayon and drew her a chart of all the things we were going to do that day. She circled each one as soon as we were done, and it was her favorite thing ever. If you can’t tell from my tiny pictures, things on the chart for that day were: visiting teaching, Home Depot for paint supplies, taking a wool blanket to the dry cleaners (it had gotten mold on it during our flooding disaster), getting a permit at the city center for installing new water heaters, returning books to the library, lunch, and then Wal-mart.
It was a wild and crazy month, but thankfully by the end of August our house was all fixed up and ready to move back in.
