August happenings

Daphne gets a hold of the camera a lot and takes pictures of her own. Most of them are of the floor and have her finger in the way, but this one was a pretty good picture. Good job on the photography, Daphne!
Our house seems to be going soooo slow, but today there was wood there (finally!) and they will start framing. These pictures are before they poured the basement and garage slabs, which are done.

August is a fun month for us because the 4th is Daphne's birthday, and the 5th is our anniversary. This year we celebrated Daphne's 3rd birthday, and our 7th anniversary. I don't have pictures from either, sadly. But on Daphne's birthday, the Difrans came down in the evening and sang and had cupcakes with us. Daphne had picked out some Hello Kitty cupcakes at the store. She opened her presents which included Hello Kitty boots (how appropriate!), a new dress, bubble bath, nail polish, pink shoes, and some books. She also had gotten a Cinderella play carriage, some princess dolls and dress up stuff, and clothes from her Hart grandparents. For our anniversary this year, Ryan made reservations for dinner at a surprise place, which was fun for me, because I actually didn't guess it this year! We went to the restaurant at The Grand America hotel and then walked around the grounds a bit. It was fun, and of course, we always can't resist our annual Snowbird retreat at this time of year. We just went one night this year, but got the activities package. We had tons of fun doing the ropes course, zip line, and of course, the alpine slides, which were the girls' favorite as well!

We went on a camping overnighter to the Spruces up Big Cottonwood last Friday with the Harts, and Ryan wanted to grow out some scruff to make him look burlier while he chopped up firewood. He did a pretty good job chopping it, but I told him that when I think of a logger, I think of the Brawny man. He can chop wood and clean up big spills.
The camping trip was fun, but a bit chilly at night. I had ordered a bunch of hand warmers to take with us, but they didn't arrive in time. It was still a blast camping though. We hadn't used our tent in quite some time.
These are a couple pictures from our Snowbird trip, mine is blurry because Ryan didn't get the focus right on my prime lens. I'll admit, you have to focus just right on a prime lens, or yep, it's blurry. But it's still cute, so I keep it.
We had a fire in Saratoga a couple weeks ago, but they got it out pretty quickly and we were only under voluntary evacuation, which never went to mandatory. That was our 3rd evacuation order since we've lived here, all due to fires. One of them actually got pretty close, but once it gets to the grass with the sprinklers on, it dies out. They had the helicopters getting buckets of water from the lake and pouring it on the fire, it was pretty cool.