My brother Mitch and his family had been in Park City during the month of July and had a week left. My mom came up to see all of us too. Ceci and I spent several days enjoying Park City with them. We went ice-skating and down the alpine slides. We went swimming and watched lots of Olympics. It was really fun to squeeze in that unique time of having them be so close, and it sure distracted us from our jetlag! I only got one picture:
Could those boys be any more irresistible?
Geoff and I had a few fun outings with Ceci while we had her to ourselves. We went to see a movie:
Ceci and I got frozen yogurt:
We watched a new mother's kids while she went on a bike ride (Ceci continually cracks me up):
And Ceci and Bailey enjoyed some long, summertime days to play together. I had a bag of Dooz's old clothes, and look who found them:
Meanwhile, Adele was in London at her friend Esther's home. They took her to Cambridge where she got to ride in the low boats through the town:
They went to a movie and to The Lion King in London:
The spent a day in London with some of Esther's friends (Esther lives about 30 minutes outside of London in Chelmsford):
They got their nails done:
They went into Esther's little town to have tea and shop around:
All this in her first week. Esther's family had a brother and his partner visit during this time:
Additionally, they had a new mother and her baby (while her husband was out of town) and a family of four relatives. It was a full house! Adele, Esther and all sisters slept on the floor of the living room each night. She got pretty tired! We had lots of FaceTime calls, not because she was homesick, but because she wanted to tell us how tired she was...
The second week she and Esther went to FSY (For the Strength of Youth), which is the equivalent of EFY. Adele LOVED it and made some great friends. She stayed in a dorm at Nottingham College. And she got a lanyard. Adele loves lanyards.
We were so glad she had a great time, and we were so glad to have her back home.
Ceci had this waiting for her on the front door:
Geoff's brother Ian came to town and stayed with us for a few days. We have always heard about his amazing memory and the girls decided to test it out. They laid out several different shoes and put a random name on each shoe. Ian studied the shoes for a moment, then the names were removed and the shoes rearranged. Ian was to go down the line of shoes and say their "name".
To our amazement and admiration he steadily said the name of each shoe, without hesitation. Impressive!
We enjoyed a summer concert at the park across the street (a little blurry!):
Ian's family joined him and they stayed at Em's. It was so fun to spend so much time with them. Eli and Kate had their 3rd birthday at the Provo City pool. That place was so much fun!
And thankfully, for these adoring cousins, there isn't a shortage of tiny babies to hold!
See me talking on the phone up above? I was talking to Tennie in Paris! While we were having all of this fun those previous three weeks Tennie was having a life-changing experience in Paris.
We had tried every means possible, unsuccessfully, to find Tennie a host family during her three week stay. Finally, a YGL (Young Global Leader) friend of Geoff's had a friend in Paris who had a friend that said they would accommodate her. The DeVisme family lived about an hour's train ride from Paris, in a town called Conflans. They picked up Tennie from the airport, got her a train pass, gave her a little corner of her own, and Tennie was on her own.
Her corner:
A view from the attic where she stayed down to the lower levels of the house:
Far before accommodations were secured we had found an internship for her through a YGL friend of Geoff's. She would be working in the communications department at Microcred, a micro-finance institution. We had purchased her a simple, professional wardrobe and here she is on her first day:
My goodness she is cute. And all grown up! Somehow she managed the trains and Metro in French. Her plan was to work until 3:00PM, explore the remarkable city of Paris until 6:00ish, then take the train home before dark. Fridays she had off to explore. She had prepared a list of all of the things she wanted to see. And that cute leather briefcase in that photo? A Zurich flea market find.
Well, after two days of work, and seeing San Chapelle and Notre Dame on those days, Tennie called saying she was REALLY tired, and she was getting bitten by something at night, as she had little, itchy bites all over her body. Other than that she was loving her adventure.
The bites were strange. In Nice both Tennie and Ceci had bites all over, and they were really itchy. We couldn't figure out what was biting them, but not the rest of us. Now Tennie was getting similar bites. The next day those "bites" were all over her body, and bigger. Tennie had the chicken pox! Those bites in Nice were the onset of chicken pox. When we got home Ceci's faded away, but Tennie got a full-on case of miserable, itchy chicken pox. So much for their vaccine!
Her cute host mom tried to fix her nourishing soups, and she bought natural healing oatmeal cream to stop the itching, but misery is misery and Tennie just had to wait out the 7-10 day sickness. She mostly sat in her corner, alone.
Try to imagine, alone at 16 in Paris with dreams and plans for adventure and independence and she gets sick. She had a good attitude overall. We had a lot of talks about plans for life that usually don't turn out how we think they will, but there is a lot to learn in the process.
After 10 days at home she ventured back to work for the final 3 days, a weekend and a tourist day. She felt like a spectacle walking around the city covered in red dots. The communications team at work had sort of "moved on" from having an American high-school intern and didn't give her the interesting projects they had discussed. She mostly just sat around doing nothing (although we challenged her to explore ways their social media could improve, which she did). Her iphone was stolen on the Metro on the way home from work one of those days, and she never tracked it down, although she made a good effort. She got home to a locked house one day so she jumped the tall fence, moved a table from the yard under the grandma's adjoining home's second story window, climbed through, walked through the connecting garages and got in her host family's home. She basically broke in! She felt pretty much out of a movie. AND, she fit in as many sites as she could with her remaining time, and left Paris feeling positive about her experience and sad to leave.
Ceci and I picked her up from the airport. Knowing Tennie was sad to leave we tried to pick her up with a little Parisian flare:
We laughed ourselves to tears trying to come up with the right faces. At last Tennie arrived:
Ceci had a sign ready on the front door at home:
It was so good to have all of us under the same roof again.
We had our annual back-to-school dinner with this year's theme:
Adele had started school two weeks earlier (Tennie missed the first two weeks of school). Look how cute she is on her first day as a 9TH GRADER.
And Ceci started school at a new Waldorf charter school. Here is the only picture I have of her on her new day, meeting her 1st grade "buddy":
And those are the big happenings of August. We also had orthodontist appointments, doctor appointments, haircuts and dentist appointments. There were meet-your-teacher events, orientations meetings and registration days. There was paperwork and forms and more things to be signed and turned in. We cleaned the chapel, and Ceci gave her last Primary talk, ever. We unpacked and washed mountains of laundry and managed jetlag three different times. We school shopped and made returns and sorted drawers and bins. Adele had Choice Humanitarian Jr. Board meetings, early morning seminary started and Tennie had an audition at the Utah Children's Theater (which she didn't get). I arranged carpools and spent some mornings at Erica's helping with her twins. I spent time at Bab's helping plan her upcoming move. And this was our lazy summer month at home. It is a busy season!
Geoff and I did sneak away for a hike up to Mary's lake one day:
Do you see that moose family lounging behind Geoff?
One day the girls had a cooking contest with what they could make with a potato, an egg and bacon (inspired by a lack of "snack food" in the house). I got to be the judge.
And to end this very long post, I will share the funny google bio that began showing up on Geoff's account for several weeks. It gave us a good laugh. Who knows how it got there!
That's all folks!
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