It seems like so much has happened in just a single month's time.  Early in the month we took the kids to get their hair cut.  Every time before, Anna would not immediately cooperate when it was her time to be done.  For whatever reason this time, she decided she wanted to be first to get done.  Anna was happy and smiling the whole time.

Due to Daddy being in a new job and working on some critical projects, we haven't been able to take a normal full week vacation.  But we did take two days in August.  On the first day off, we took the kids to Indian Echo Caverns in Hummelstown (between Harrisburg and Hershey).  We purposely kept ourselves at the back of the tour group in case the kids were slow so we wouldn't hold up the entire group.  For the most part, they did pretty good on the tour.  They were probably a little young yet to fully enjoy it, and sometimes we hoped they were not too loud that the other people were bothered.  They only bad time on the tour was the part when they shut off all the lights to show you absolute darkness.  Anna was very concerned and cried a little bit.  Thankfully someone right next to us has a small flashlight they turned on, but put their thumb over so it wasn't real bright but still enough to calm her down.  Once the tour was over, we let them play in the playground they had there.  In the gift shop, Anna and Jonathan put on the toy miner's hats.  We tried to get Lydia to put one on, but she wanted nothing to do with it.  From there, we continued on to the outlets in Hershey to shop a little bit.

The kids probably enjoyed the next day a little bit better.  Someone Mommy works with told her about Cherry Crest Adventure Farm near Strasburg, PA.  The farm is the original farm to start the corn maze trend.  They have a lot of activities for kids of all ages.  There was a small maze made of hay bales the kids really liked.  Lydia really enjoyed the small wagons pulled by a small tractor that we rode on.  Jonathan liked feeding the sheep there.  Anna liked all the animals.  Lydia, however, was scared of the goats and the sheep.  The only scary part of the day was when we thought Jonathan was going to get run over by the train from the Strasburg Rail Road.  The rail line runs right through the farm.  They had the crossing closed for the train to come through.  As the train got closer and blew the horn, Jonathan ran along the fence to a corner, where if he ducked around one side and then went back the other way could have ended up near the train!  We had planned to try the train ride that day too.  But by the time we were ready to leave the farm, we could tell the kids were wore out.  So it wasn't worth doing the train since they wouldn't have enjoyed it by that point.

Daddy is now happy to say "Hello, I'm a Mac!".  But he's been too busy with work and everything else to completely transition everything from our older PC over.  Of course getting the photos over was the top priority.  But there are some other documents and music that need to be transferred.  Our old laptop was slow at working with some of the photos we take depending on what camera we used.  The new Mac is much faster at working with the photos, which is why we wanted the Mac.

Unfortunately our water heater has decided to start leaking last week.  We had been talking about getting one of the new tankless heaters anyways, so the leak is forcing us to get it a little sooner than we planned.  Nothing in the basement got wet other than the platform the water heater is sitting on, which is good.  Since the current one still generates hot water is not completely broken, we did not have to have a rush installation done.  So it will be replaced this coming Wednesday.

This coming Thursday the kids will start preschool!  As there is a toy bag that can be worn like a backpack the the kids have been fighting over it, we think they'll love their backpacks we got them for school.  They like them in the store the day we got them.  So hopefully they like everything else about going.  We'll take them to an "orientation" the night before, so maybe that will help too.

Oh, we also had Portrait Innovations take pictures of the kids earlier in the month too.  You'll see pictures from that and some of the other stuff mentioned above in the August photos on the photos page.

That's it for this month.