September

The kids are officially back in school by now. We are just trying to get used to our new schedules and routes to pick up and drop off the kids. Emily also has Seminary in the mornings. I thought that we were going to have a lot of trouble getting her to Seminary on time. She's not usually much of a morning person, but she has taken to her new schedule remarkably well. She sets out her clothes in the morning. When her alarm goes off, she gets dressed, eats breakfast and cleans up and takes herself off to church. She has been pretty responsible for herself lately, for which I am very glad.

After Caitlyn gets up and gets ready, we pick up Emily after Seminary and I drop the kids off to their respective schools.

The weather is still pretty atrocious, so we have still not spent much time out of doors. We have been spending a lot of time getting ready for the Mid Autumn Festival. We have made a ton of moon cakes. We have made many kinds and have been slowly learning a lot.

We even made our own salted eggs to go into the mooncakes. Lots of friends and neighbors have tasted some of our creations. We even dropped some off to my mom to try.

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Christian has also been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what is wrong with my car. He's been doing a lot of research and we started ordering some of the parts but we have yet to make any other repairs yet.

On Labor Day weekend, we got one slightly cooler day but unfortunately, we spent the day clearing out our drains. We have been having some problems with our main sewage line for some time now and no matter what we tried, it would not drain quite completely. So, Christian finally went and rented an industrial snake and we cut through whatever was blocking up the pipes. He ended up snaking the whole thing up to the septic tank just to be sure. We had the equipment rented out to us for a few more hours anyway!

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We ended up celebrating my birthday a bit early because we would be really busy that next week. Christian spent all weekend making all sorts of tasty food. He made us some homemade smoked corned beef and sourdough bread one night. The next night, he made my favorite smothered cabbage and naan. Emily started to make some cream puffs for me but it didn't quite work out and we had to let the batter firm up in the refrigerator for a while before it could be used. She used a new recipe and I guess it was quite different.

I got lots of fancy new cookware for my birthday.

On my actual birthday, I was able to use some of my new cooking swag and we finally got to have Emily's tasty cream puffs.