Before Abe Left -- Misc.

We had a month and a half between Abe's graduation and his mission departure, so not everything going on this summer was BIG or a LAST. Abe was gone two of those summer weeks (a senior trip to Moab and a stake mission training camp) and the older girls were gone for another week (camp); and true there probably wasn't actually a day when Abe was home that didn't have some mission-readying thing going on (typhoid shots, background checks, apostilles, shopping, filling out a huge family history packet, boxing up and organizing his room, going to the temple, etc.). But! Abe still worked now and then at Farr's through the end of June, and he still went for a few bike rides, and had nerf-gun battles with Jesse, and played basketball with friends. And the rest of us still did very ordinary summer-time things like we would have done regardless of anyone coming or going in our family. 

Here is a very small sampling of those ordinary things (meaning -- the ordinary things that I actually happened to take pictures of):

Daisy lounging. Kids scattered about:

A Sunday evening walk:

Reading books. (Hans looks just like someone undercover pretending to read a newspaper . . . they always get it upside down.)

Trying to give Starling a new perspective by sitting her up in the Bumbo (she mostly flumps to the side and doesn't love it):

Sisters holding sister:

Boys coloring:

Jesse looking for robot parts in our garage: 

Me with 10th child. She is not a newborn at all anymore is she. She didn't even give me three months! (But! She smiles and rolls over and tries to hold toys and even laughs. And somehow each of those rather ordinary things, when it is her doing them? Well, they seem almost as miraculous as having a newborn baby at all.)

The End.