Highlights of this summer!

I haven't blogged  in awhile. This summer has flown by but it has been a good one! I'll spare you from telling you everything I've done this summer but the pictures below are some highlights.

My niece, Cami, got her mission call and went through the temple for the first time back in May. I got to be on the session as she went through for the first time and that was a pretty sweet experience. :) (She's going to the France Lyon mission.)

I hosted an FHE at my house and enlisted the help of my niece, Emma, to make a cake for it. The picture above is what Emma made for it! It was a beautiful cake and everyone was highly impressed. :)

The FHE Emma made the cake for was a birthday party for everyone. What did we do at our birthday party you ask? Well we ate pizza, cake, and ice cream. We  played taboo and sang-a-long to The Gambler by Kenny Rogers and laughed a lot.  :)

One of my co-workers called me up one Friday evening and asked if I wanted to go to downtown DC with her. One of her cousins, who lives in England, had sent her a Flat Stanley and she needed to go and take pictures of Flat Stanley in some famous places downtown.

I went with her and can I just say how pretty DC is at dusk?! The sky and the weather was so lovely that evening!

I've been trying to learn how to do side French braids in my hair. This was one of my attempts at it. I'm still learning, but I hope someday I'll get it to look decent. ;)

Back in July, I made cinnamon rolls for a breakfast family gathering we had at a nearby park. They turned out pretty dang well, if I do say so myself. ;)

Some of the kiddos were at the park playing and I was taking the picture, so we're not all in the picture, but this is most of us who were at the family gathering.

It was a fun morning and the weather was actually really nice that day for being July.

One of my coworkers worked in our office just for the summer. She had never been to Washington DC before and she didn't want to explore by herself so I happily volunteered to go with her to some of the famous sites of DC. Three times this summer, we took some field trips to DC as well as to Old Town Alexandria.

When we went to Old Town Alexandria, we went to the farmer's market, the Torpedo Factory (which I love to visit and is pictured above), the Carlyle House and the old Apothecary.

I highly recommend all of those things to do in Alexandria. I'd never been to the Apothecary before and it was so cool! When you stepped into that building it was like stepping back in time. It was exactly how the owners had left it back in the 1930s. Any way, Old Town Alexandria was fun!

 Look at those beautiful flowers in front of the temple!

One Saturday, I went on a short road trip by myself.  My first stop was Shepherdstown, West Virginia, then Antietam Battlefield Cemetery, then Pry House Field Hospital Museum (pictured above), then Melt burger joint in Leesburg. It was a really good road trip! I felt like I left all of my worries behind and I just drove, enjoyed the beautiful scenery, listened to good music and had some really good conversations with strangers at almost every site I visited.

The burger I got at the Melt. As you may or may not know, I'm a bit of a burger snob and so I have pretty high expectations for burgers from burger joints. One of my friends had recommended this place to me and I was not disappointed. That was a dang good burger! :)

My parents came to town for a week. Mainly to see my nephew, Lincoln, get baptized (and I will hopefully blog about later) but we did get to go to the Philadelphia temple open house while they were here. The temple was beautiful!