Happy Birthday to Abigail

Abigail turned 1 year old last week - Happy Birthday Abi!

We all celebrated and Grandma and Grandpa's house with cake and ice cream...














...presents (a new drum!)...



















....and with the adults watching Sarah Palin speak at the Republican National Convention. Party!

Mount Timpanogos

A picture of Mt. Timpanogos from the Alpine Basin to the east of it.

On Saturday August 30th I woke up at 4:30 and got ready to head to Utah County with a group of church friends. Ready to go on a hike? How about 7 miles up and 7 miles back down? Yes, this is going to be an all day event. We started the trail at 6:45 a.m and it was beautiful, I can't even begin to describe it, so here's a few pictures. It was beautiful. We reached the peak at 11:45. It was amazing to be up so high (11,441 feet) and to see all of Utah County and Utah Lake to the west, the Bingham Copper mine up North, and to the East I could see Jordanelle, Deer Creek Reservoir, Heber, what an amazing panoramic view. It's also amazing to hike that and see how much depth there is to that mountain that looks relatively two dimensional. It looks like a tent from the valley, wide coming up to the tip then going down, but there's so much depth to it, so many different peaks, there's a huge basin behind it that we climbed through, it was amazing. Shannon hikes it every year and I hope to join her in that annual tradition if we stay in Utah. Laura came, she did awesome, but her shoes weren't that good, so she slipped a few times and her ankles gave way on the way down her knee got pretty scratched and looks bad to me, but she said it doesn't hurt. She's a trooper. On the way down, wanting to try and make it a little bit of a pleasant experience for her, I decided to run the rest of the trail down and go get the car - we had to park a mile up the Alpine loop road cause the parking lot was full. The attendants at the gate for access to the canyon seemed a little too eager to tell us when we pulled up at 6:00 that the parking lot had been full since 4:30. Show offs. They were trying to make us feel bad - here we had tried to get a head start on the day and everyone else beat us to it. So we had a mile walk back to the car after we finished hiking down the trail. We were all ready to be done. I reached the bottom at 3:45, so it was 4 hours down. Pretty good time - 14 miles in 9 hours.

So that was my first time up Mount Timpanogos, loved it.

A picture of our Group in the Saddle.

Looking West down at Utah County

My first time ever seeing mountain Goats!

Me on top of the world

La Familia Montes

So I haven't posted for a while - but I have a good reason. We are hosting a family of 5 from Argentina. They've been here for about a month, and things are starting to settle into a routine enough for me to actually document some of it. I'll be posting some pics now and then of our house guests who are Pablo and Laura and their three boys, Lucas, Tomas, and Julian. With our family of 4 boys, Melodie is feeling a little outnumbered here. Abi doesn't notice or care yet. But so far so good. Laura and I are applying some FlyLady strategies and have started alternating dinner days following this menu:

Sunday - Crockpot/frozen dinner
Monday - Beef
Tuesday - Pasta/Cassarole
Wednesday - Fish/Seafood
Thursday - Chicken/Pork
Friday - New Recipe/Ethnic dish
Saturday - Pizza

Today was my turn - I love Pizza night! Easy dinner for 13 taken care of with two pizzas in the oven, yes!