We picked up our friend Graham and his mom and headed up north for a little day trip.

First stop – Paleo Dig Site

Graham is reading about the different types of fossils that you can find here.

Climbing up the fossil hill

Found something right away!

Looking for the perfect spot

Next stop – Tonto Fish Hatchery

We brought cups this time to get lots of fish chow for all of the baby trout

The baby fish were trying to swim up this stream!

Graham called this “The Grand Finale”. The fish went nuts.

The bigger trouts go nuts too!

We made our way up to the final destination – Woods Canyon Lake. Now to try our luck catching trout from the lake.

We fished and fished. There was a lot of biting and not any catching. But we had a great day and enjoyed the nice weather.

August 2nd:

Dust storm coming in!

Time to go inside!

Too late, already crunching grit in my teeth. Eww.

August 6th:

Brendan has an Echo/EKG and visit to the cardiologist. He is being checked frequently for fluid buildup around his lungs and liver. He does such a good job getting through all of these tests.

Brendan was super excited that his favorite shirt was just like his doctors! (The checkers on B’s shirt are just super small)

Brendan loves playing with the heart models.

The boys love this bench at the hospital. They call it a spaceship!

August 8th

First day of first grade!

New backpacks!

The first day went well, the boys are excited to ride the bus home. Bill and I met them at the bus stop.

The 8th is also Happy Birthday to Bill day! Happy Birthday Bill! We made a belt of candles for rapid deployment.

It was harder than I thought to get them all to stand up

Sing fast! Trevor was worried about the wax dripping on the cake.

August 13th:

Another powerful monsoon season microburst hits the neighborhood.

Trees were down everywhere!

August 14th:

Brendan picks up his new glasses! He tried on all different styles and colors and these were his ultimate favorite.

wink wink

They definitely match with one of his favorite shirts!

We took another trip to our local LegoLand. I took an unusual amount of photos there because we took Brendan’s friend Graham along. We did the whole circuit.

Starting with the outside octopus, we got there the moment it opened. We skip the movie intro and get the place all to ourselves for a short time.

We were the first ones on the shooting ride.

We breezed through Miniland

The played for an oddly long time in Duplo Town before any babies arrived.

They gathered up every single yellow Lego jumbo brink and pretended that it was a vault full of gold so they could play cops and robbers. Then they added some green cash too!

Graham is silly, we like him!

See Trevor? They disappear for hours in to this climbing structure.

The special feature right now is dinosaur land.

There is an instructional volcano showing you how to build dinos

Then there is a dino to eat you

Brendan loved this big orange one.

Time for the 4D movie

Then on to Build-a-Car

Once we made cars, it was on to lunch!

Brendan and Graham each got a blind-bag figure and ended up with the same one!

All these boys are silly

Flush Graham down the Lego pit

Flush Brendan

And Trevor too!

Why I oughta….

One more time through the shooting ride..

Four and a half hours of fun.. phew!