August was a busy month! Be prepared for a long post!
Roman turned 9 months old! He weighed in at 22lbs (85%) and measured 29 inches (70%). He's learning more sounds, eats lots of foods, pulls himself into standing constantly and has now been outside the womb longer than inside :) I always feel like that's an important milestone for some reason! He's a terrible sleeper, had been for months at this point....I had constant headaches and was more short tempered than usual (so sorry Hattie!). I thought he had teeth coming in, but here we are at 10+ months and still no teeth. Despite his lack of sleeping, he is still a happy and delightful baby during the day! We love this boy!
We decided to take a family trip to some national parks. First hit Arches in Moab, UT.
The hike to Delicate Arch (you know, the most famous one, it's on Utah's license plate)
Hattie's favorite part? Playing in the sand.
The cool thing about this hike, is that you don't see the arch until the very end. You walk along a cliff and around a corner and then there it is! It's your reward for finishing a difficult hike. And it's huge!
Waiting in line to get our picture under the arch:
There we are! It's so big!
Skyview arch- a very easy and short hike right off the road. But that's all we were up for after the hike to Delicate Arch!
After a break we headed over to Canyonlands National Park. This one had WAY fewer people, but not as much hiking. We just stopped at the lookout points. We were done with hiking for the day anyways!
It was beautiful! Similar to the Grand Canyon (imagine that!).
I love love love this picture!
I decided to get a picture of me
The next day we headed over to Colorado to see Mesa Verde National Park. It was SO COOL! I loved it. And Hattie loved the dead trees. What a wack-a-doodle. She wanted her picture taken with this one. It was her favorite. I also loved the weather- the day we arrived it was about 70 and overcast. Felt chilly coming from the mid 90s in Moab (and Ogden before that).
Romy did SO GREAT the entire trip. He loves to be outside. As we were starting our hike to Delicate Arch there was a dad heading back to the parking lot carrying a baby in a backpack. The kid was crying loudly and he exclaimed to Kurt "good luck!" I was a bit worried at that moment, but it wasn't needed. Roman was content the entire time we were out hiking (it was only rough at night with his not-sleeping).
The nice thing about doing the Delicate Arch hike first is that everything else we did the rest of the trip seemed easy-peasy. Our first hike to some ruins in Mesa Verde: Step House.
And this is why it's called Step House! It's the only site (all the ruins are tucked under cliff overhangs) with steps leading down to it. The ancient staircase is now unusable, but it's the only place stairs are found- maybe others had stairs, but nothing is left now. Who knows! As we found out later at Balcony House, we (as in historians and archaeologists) aren't even sure how ancient people got down to their dwellings! Researchers and excavators back in the first half of the 20th century carved out the stairs that we use today.
A pit house and a kiva (the picture directly below). Pit houses were dug directly into the ground and a kiva is basically the same thing, but created out of stones. This is the only site where both coexist. The pit houses are from earlier settlers (about 200 years older than the kivas). Farmers settled on top of the mesa first, where the farmed, but the area ended up being prosperous and after a while they ran out of room so families started building new settlements tucked under the cliffs beneath the mesa. They built the same kind of pit houses, but since they couldn't dig into the rock, they built their homes out of rocks (like laying bricks), and kept the same type of structure.
The pit houses had raised roofs like seen below, the kivas would have had flat roofs so people could walk over them, and use the tops of homes a living space. They definitely needed the extra space in the cliff dwellings!
Here you can see the kivas, pit houses, and staircase.
When we got back up on top of the mesa after seeing step house there were horses running around! Hattie loved seeing them!
The next day we saw Balcony House and the Cliff Palace. These were ticketed tours led by park rangers. Balcony house was our favorite! We were concerned at first when the park ranger told us we would be climbing up a 30ft ladder and crawling through tunnels which would require Kurt to take Roman off his back. And we weren't sure how Hattie would do on such a huge ladder.
There was no need to worry! Hattie LOVED climbing the ladders and crawling through the tunnels. It was fun for all of us!
I loved the decorative touch this person used on their home- pebbles in the mortar between stones!
The right building was a later addition. We know it was built 30 years later from dendochronology (tree ring dating!). Dendochronolgy has been widely used in the Four Corners Region as the dry, desert like climate has preserved wood for hundreds even over a thousand years. These homes are around 900 years old.
Here's another alteration to a home- see where the door used to be?
And here's the other side of the door- they filled it in, but made a shelf.
Our only family photo! Taken by another guy on the tour- he and his son were visiting from Sammamish, WA! Something awesome about National Parks in how international they are. We heard several different languages spoken among visitors, and even heard a couple speaking French. I knew Kurt wanted to talk to them, so I helped him out by offering the couple to take a picture of them. And then asking where they were from and saying, oh! My husband speaks French. They were actually from a town within Kurt's mission, he'd never served there but knew just where it was. He spoke with them for several minutes! Hattie's wearing a Husky shirt in this photo and every day one of us was wearing something Washington- Mariners, Seahawks, or UW. So we got to speak to several different people we were from Washington, went to school at UW, or were just fans of the teams! It's fun to make connections to people.
Back to Balcony House (I'll have way less to write about the Cliff Palace, thanks for sticking with me!). It's hard to see, but this is a piece of art! It mimics the skyline as viewed from the home. See the mountains?
It was hard to get a good shot of the Balcony House as we never saw it from a distance, but this gets most of it. See the kivas? They think 40-50 people lived here.
And here's Cliff Palace! The largest of all the ruins! They estimate 120-150 people lived here at one time. We were told a lot of the same info here, but it was amazing to see this huge structure the Pueblo people were able to build hundreds of years ago! Again, this was built around 900 years ago (thanks to tree ring dating).
Again, Hattie loved playing in the sand.
On to the next adventure! We went up to Iona for the Great American Eclipse! We had a perfect view of totality from Grandpa's backyard. Uncle Todd was there too with his fancy, eclipse filter equipped camera. It was amazing! I've heard a lot of people say they don't understand what the big deal was. Why do you need to travel to totality? Especially when they could see 92% right in Ogden. Well, let me tell you from experience, the difference between 99% and 100% is astonishing. When the sun is completely covered, you can take off your eclipse glasses- it was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. A black hole in the sky with white light dancing around its edges. There was a 360 degree 'sunset'. It was twilight in the middle of the day. It was colder. It was amazing, surreal, and I am so glad we went up for it. My description doesn't do it justice, but there are a few more eclipse coming to the US in coming years/decades and if you live near a totality zone I highly encourage you to go!
You can kind of see the lighting. Cameras have this annoying feature of trying to capture as much light as possible, so it looks lighter than it actually was.
Roman woke up from his nap just before totality.
And these pictures are from Todd. They're amazing, but they don't do it justice!
And some trips from the rest of our stay. Nothing beats Grandpa's backyard!
Running through the sprinkler- we forgot Hattie's swimsuit.
Roman at 9 months is about half an inch shorter than Hattie at 15 months!
And finally, our last highlight of the month of August- KURT'S BIRTHDAY! We love this guy! To make his day special I made a German Chocolate crepe cake (I normally make a plain old German Chocolate cake, but I mixed it up this year) and took a day trip to Park City. Kurt took the day off from work! It was a wonderful day!
Hattie put the candles on.
Park City was pretty empty!
At the restaurant
Hattie and Kurt went down the Alpine Slide- here they are riding up the ski lift.
It took a while so Roman and I had fun with rocks while we waited.
I could hear Hattie before I saw them, screaming for joy! She had a blast!
The look of pure happiness
A picture Kurt took right before heading down:
We stopped at the Olympic Park too- riding the bobsled!
This was cool- people in skis would go down the ramps/jumps and into the pool. Hattie loved watching. So did we!
And we stopped at the Adidas Outlet our way out.....we all ended up getting shoes. My white adidas are my favorite shoes now....I might wipe them down after every wear. I'm scared of getting them dirty!
Happy Birthday Kurt! We love you tons!
And that's a wrap.
