At Home in the Mountains

 Summer flew by too fast. Monday is back to school seems excited about her new school this year. Hopefully she can keep that "school is fun and exciting feeling" and not get the "back to prison" feeling that I get this time of year. Here are some picks of the highlights of our summer. We went to Colorado over 4th of July weekend and stayed two weeks. We celebrated the 4th in Colorado Springs. Maddy had fun playing with her cousins and making s'mores. We got the girls glo stick since we couldn't have any type of fireworks. They had a lot of fun with those, including using them to sword fight.  Concert on the lawn by Granna. Looks like it was good.  We went to the Garden of the Gods trading post for lunch with my parents. That's always a very relaxing and enjoyable activity. Grandad bought Maddy a bucket of rocks to put through the sluice they have there.  We did lots of hiking. We got rained on one day and ended up looking like drowne...

So I never thought I'd go to the giant Spa Castle just down the road from our house. Apparently this is the largest Asian spa outside of New York. However, my bro-in-law, Brad, decided that Cindy and I needed some relaxation and a break from scrapping children so he set up a spa day for us and sent us off yesterday morning to enjoy ourselves. Going to the spa isn't an activity I'd ever choose for myself and probably would not have enjoyed if I'd gone alone. But it was interesting to see inside this monstrosity and we did enjoy ourselves. The behemoth We got there about an hour before our massage appointments so we could hang out in the pool and look around. We had to leave our shoes in a locker and then go pick up a "uniform" that we were supposed to wear everywhere except the pool The pools were all very nice and it was fairly deserted on a Tuesday morning so we didn't have to worry too much about looking like the awkward people who had no i...