In case you weren’t convinced of our adventuring this summer; here is a nice long video documenting it. Josh made it, and it is great! 

Mostly it was made and is being posted for family history purposes; so don’t feel like you need to watch the whole thing.

Also, here is a story from today. I am really sad I missed it because it sounds so great! This all went down as I was out feeding Helen during Sacrament Meeting. The congregation had just finished the rest hymn when Portia immediately sang out, loudly enough for all to hear, “Happy Birthday to you!” Josh said that after it happened, a chuckle rose up from the whole congregation! We love Portia!

Also, a good story for the family record would be the story of last night. Josh and I got the cute neighborhood girls to come over and watch our kids so we could go to a concert. The concert went later than we usually stay out when the girls are watching the kids, so we decided we would see how they did doing bedtime with the kids. We gave them a list of what we usually do and reminded the kids that they needed to be super good for the girls’ first time doing bedtime. We left and enjoyed our date (with Helen in tow, so mostly a date) quite tranquilly, fully believing that all would be well and the children would be fast asleep when we returned.

What we actually came home to was a totally quiet and empty house, as far as we could tell. But then as we looked around for the baby-sitters we heard, crying out from the basement, “Help us! Let us out!”

Back story: several months ago our door-knob to the basement door broke such that the side of the door that faces the stairs won’t open by simply turning the handle. You must grab hold of the lock part and turn that the opposite way as you would to lock the door and then it opens no problem. The girls did not know that. And though Fay and Carter each have some idea of how to do it, apparently neither of them could explain it to the babysitters.

So those poor girls had been stuck in our basement with the phone upstairs, so they couldn’t call for help, for over an hour when we got home, along with three overtired and rather frantic children. And apparently all this after they had to coax Portia out of the garage, where she had been screaming for some time for missing Mommy and Daddy, to even start bedtime, and dealt with her talking and screaming all through the bedtime routine. They probably don’t feel like coming back any time soon… 🙁

Also, we decided we had better finally bite the bullet and replace the doorknob.

Oh well, it clearly made a good story.