Back to normal

Wow, we weren't even the ones traveling and we feel like we have jet lag. This is probably the first day of "normal" that I have had all week. We have truly enjoyed all of our house guests this summer. The most recent visitors were our dear friends, Suzanne and Balazs. They stayed with us and they went to Denali for a few days. We LOVED having you guys here!! Thanks for all the memories. Their trip to Denali was awesome- they saw every animal and they even saw Mt. McKinley! Then, we were driving down south last weekend, we were just past Anchorage and we pulled off the road to see beluga whales!! Shawn says that we are taking them with us on our next vacation because they are good luck. Seeing the whales is a once in a lifetime experience. My camera was slow, but this is a picture of a whale. They were swimming pretty close to the shore. We must have seen a dozen of them out there! (Balazs, I need a copy of your video!)

I was actually driving them down south to Portage to see the glaciers. There are 100,000 glaciers here in AK. This is just an example of what we can see from the highway.

I don't know who enjoyed their visit more- Shawn and I or Nick and Stella.

So...what do we do on a "normal" day? Good question. I am not sure if we really have a "normal" day. Every day is different. It was just nice today because we stayed around the home. I have been mourning the loss of summer for the past two weeks. But now, I am ready for fall. In fact, I welcome it. Soon we will have snow. We will rake the leaves and mow the grass one more time before we snuggle in to our little house for the winter. I really like fall. It is such a cozy time of year. I think it is Shawn's favorite season (but I bet that is because it is also football season). So, since it IS fall (see, welcoming it) I put down the treadmill for the first time since I don't know when and took a little run today. I keep it folded up during the summer. I don't know, it seems almost sacreligious to run inside here during the summer. Anyway, I was really shocked how well this treadmill thing worked out. I ran, Nick played with his toys, and Stella played with hers. I even watched a TV show. It was awesome. I just couldn't believe how well the kids played. It was perfect until Nicholas, and I quote, "bonked Stella on the head" with his garbage truck. So Stella cried and Nick got a time out.







Then later, Stella napped and Nicholas and I headed outside for some gardening and soccer. This little garden didn't produce as well as I had hoped, but we still picked quite a bit from it. We just didn't have the heat that it needed. Every time we did have a warm day, the plants would grow several inches overnight. Honestly. And I am not a gardener. I just put seeds in the ground and crossed my fingers. I don't know what I am doing. But one day I hope to have a real garden. So this is just for practice, I guess. We grilled the last of our zucchini when Suzanne and Balazs were here. Today we picked the last handful of sugar snap peas and a whole bucket of carrots. We have one more carrot patch and that will be it for the garden.



The rest of our day has been rather uneventful...lunches and naps, which neither Nicholas or Stella wanted to do these at the same times today. So now Stella is waking up. Nicholas has been up for about 30 min now. Guess this will do it for our post for today.