The kids started school on August 2nd. This was a giant change since we'd finished school in Washington on June 19th and would have started on September 9th. They still had Monday the 1st off, so they played with granny and grandpa at the house. Grandpa taught Tyler how to play Chess.
After Oscar was done with work we took them to Garden of the Gods.
The kids loved seeing a mama deer and her two fawns running around this first formation.
Tyler squeezed in between the rocks here while we walked around enjoying the pretty scenery.
Martha took some pictures of us while we walked. I like this photo she took of me. It's very natural and represents my general mood when I'm having fun being a tourist.
Kissing camels!
When it was big enough, Oscar and Allison got in the rocks with Tyler.
Oscar came to Garden of the Gods in 2019 after running the Pikes Peak Marathon. He took us up for a little hike to a lookout he'd seen on his previous visit. Oscar took a nice panorama of the view we had up there, though my face got a bit smooshed.
Marcus and Martha opted out of the little hike but were able to see a few more deer on the ground. When we came down we saw a couple jumping across the path.
We actually got super lucky weather wise. A storm was rolling in, and it did start raining as we were walking back to our car, but before it started it cooled things down nicely. We picked the perfect time to be there, avoiding the 90 degree temperatures earlier and the storm later.
We went out to dinner at Carrabas after finishing up at the park.
The storm was followed up by a lovely morning the next day.
Oscar gave the kids blessings before their first day at school and Martha came over to drop them off with me (they take the bus now, but here you have to pay for bus service and get a bus pass before you can use the service, so I had to drop them off for the first week). Marcus and Martha took off for Missouri shortly after we returned home.
Cute kids and cats!
We love having a big yard, but the ground is rock hard, it's super difficult to grow grass, and water bills here skyrocket after you reach a specific amount of usage (we found that out the hard way when the toilet in the kids' bathroom was on constant light flush, and we were charged hundreds of dollars on our water bill. When we replaced the toilet our water bill went way down). Right now it's just full of weeks, so we're going to need to figure out some xeriscaping and lay a bunch of concrete and turf. That will need to be a 2023 priority since we made finishing the basement our top priority in 2022, but I insisted we get a trampoline so the kids would have a good reason to go out in the yard. Oscar ordered a Springfree trampoline because of their high safety ratings, and Tyler helped him build it. He pretended he was jumping on it before it was completed. Oscar took these pictures and thought he looked like Vecna rising up to the sky in "Stranger Things."
Oscar and I went hiking and went out for Indian food while the kids were at the August Parents' Night out. They go from 5:00pm - 9:30pm and get to go swimming, eat pizza, and watch a movie for only $15 a kid. It's a great deal. We've done it every month since we arrived.
Here's Allison building a dragon out of Zoobs and the kids decorating their own donuts at a donut themed birthday party.
Nibbler's super sweet, but he makes it hard for me to play the piano sometimes when he walks on the keys and jumps on me while I'm playing.
We've started sending Nibbler outside too since he started getting mark happy at night, but he doesn't like it as much as Fry. If we're out there and interacting with him he's fine, so I think once we do some landscaping and get some nice patio furniture and spend more time out there, he and Leela will see it as simply an extension of the house. He got himself stuck in the window well repeatedly, so Oscar built a cat tree for him to climb out of it. Of course now that he has a safe way to get in and out we've never seen him bother going in there again.
Oscar caught these pictures of a hawk perched on the house across from us.
Here's some August art from Tyler
Here's some August art from Allison
And here's an "I See Cats" book the two of them collaborated on. Allison made the drawings and wrote the words but Tyler organized it and put it all together in book form.
I took the kids to Elitch Gardens on a Friday they had off of school. Most of the area schools had just started back a few days earlier, so it was an off season day. The few other young kids there all appeared to be homeschooled. Elitch's used to be a 6 Flags before it was sold to the same company that owns Wild Waves in Washington, so it's much bigger that Wild Waves and has some good rides. However, a lot of the rides were closed and their long loading process and safety checks makes things move super slow. Fortunately the lines weren't very big that day, and it doesn't take long to load you in a tube on the water slides, so we still had a lot of fun.
We were most happy about having a fun ball play area again. This must have been here when Elitch's was a 6 Flags because many other 6 Flags we've visited have a similar area. The kids first played at one called The Loony Tunes Lodge at 6 Flags Magic Mountain in February 2020 just before the pandemic. They were all closed at the 6 Flags we visited in 2020 and 2021 except for when we went back to Magic Mountain in August 2021. Even then only the slides were available to play on. The climbing areas were all closed and they'd removed all the balls. This was our first time back in a ball play area with everything open operating at full capacity in 2.5 years. The kids loved it! That alone made the long drive worth it.
We returned to Elitch's with Oscar on a Saturday a couple weeks later hoping more rides would be open. There were more rides open, but the lines were very long and very slow, so we didn't get to do many of them. We first did the wave pool then waited for a water slide that hadn't been open the first time we'd visited. After 15 minutes we'd barely moved, so we changed out of our swimsuits to check out the theme park, but all of the adult rides had crazy long lines too. Only the kids' ride lines were reasonable, so that's pretty much all we did. I have no intention of returning on a Saturday again unless I buy one of their fast passes. Those lines were nuts!
Allison loves bumper cars, and I knew she would love these ones with a cat and mouse theme. She did love them, but she struggled to control her car. She was delighted when she was bumping into other kids, but she got angry and frustrated when she got caught in a spin and couldn't get out of it. She didn't manage to figure it out that visit, but I'm happy to say that she did figure it out on our next visit in October and had the time of her life riding the bumper cars at least 7 times in a row.
And we enjoyed looking at the fish in their giant pond before heading out. Too bad they don't have fish food for us to feed them.
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