Busy September (part 1)

Where did September go?  The month was so busy for us that it seems all a blur in retrospect.  Fortunately it was full of fun, happy things.

Rhett saying "Hello Doggies!" at the home of a family in our ward where we were having our youth activity early last month.

Grandma and Grandpa Duersch came to visit from Utah for five days.  When they arrived they found a little bird on our walkway that seemed to have flown into the window and become temporarily unable to fly.  The boys enjoyed looking at her (and poking and prodding her) until Grandpa placed her on a branch of a bush to recover.

Benjamin and Rhett couldn't have been more thrilled to have people to play games with them!  Grandpa was oh-so-patient playing Hungry Hungry Hippos...

and Grandma was a great Candy Land traffic director, keeping Rhett out of Benjamin's way while they both navigated the board.

Grandpa's new iPad was a huge hit.

On the second day of their visit we drove to Mount Baker and went on a little hike.  The boys enjoyed the snow!

Benjamin loved using the binoculars.

Rhett insisted on being carried the whole way down.

On the way back from Mt. Baker we stopped at Nooksack Falls.  It was very awesome, but the splendor of it all was hard to focus on while Rhett was trying to slip through a gap in the fence, on the other side of which were slippery rocks and a steep drop into a rushing river.

 

More to come.

August Overview

We have been terrible bloggers lately.  I can't believe two months went by and we hardly documented a thing!  So here, in brief, are some of the things that went on at the Duersch house in August.

We picked blueberries... about 30 pounds altogether.  The little farm stand down the street sold them for $1 per pound.  Some ended up as jam.

 

We watched our garden grow.

Thanks to our great backdoor neighbors we acquired a large supply of free apples, most of which were salvaged from the ground half rotten. I canned 40 quarts of applesauce.  Paul was at Priest/Laurel Conference.  It was a long weekend.

I learned (for future reference) to stock up on used canning jars during the off-season because when I ran out toward the end of the applesauce project the thrift stores hardly had any, and Goodwill tried to charge me .99 for a quart jar.  I've lost a lot of respect for our Goodwill since then.  (A quart jar is not worth 99 cents.)

The boys played outside in the water, sometimes with pants, sometimes without.

We visited the Northwest Washington Fair and saw newborn calves and piglets, various reptiles, and horses named Rhett and Ben.  We decided to always name our kids after horses at the fair so we can get pictures taken with them each year.  Not really.

We also glimpsed Rick Springfield, ate fair scones, and visited the John Deere shop.

Paul and I went to the temple in Vancouver, B.C.

And I did a little bit of sewing.  (Note: I didn't like how the inside pockets were constructed and would change that in the future.  Definitely a learning project, like most everything I make.)

And finally, we took on an unplanned bathroom project, five days before guests were to arrive.  Thank goodness for two bathrooms!

When we moved in this was the state of the shower in the master bathroom:

No kidding.  The inspector barely wanted to touch it.  Can you blame him?  We tossed around the idea of tearing it all out, on my part mainly because I didn't want to go anywhere near it even to clean it.  We decided it was just too expensive so my heroic husband got in there and scrubbed till it could pass as a usable shower.

But it still had problems.  It took massive amounts of strength and patience to turn the water off so there would not be a dripping shower head.  After a few months it became nearly impossible and at about that same time we begin to hear through the wall that something was amiss with the plumbing.  Sure enough, Paul took apart the wall to find a nice leaky pipe.

We got some help fixing the leak, but why stop there?  We hated that shower anyway.

So off came more drywall, behind which we discovered hidden scraps of more drywall stashed in the wall by the builders.  Nice.

Paul had lots of good help.

And finally, out came the nasty shower.  That I had cleaned the day before.

 

  

We now have a nice new bathtub in there, but the busyness of September has prevented more progress in there.  Like I said, thank goodness for two bathrooms.