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I wrote this post in my head as I was cleaning my bathroom uninterrupted this morning.  Yep, you read that right, I was cleaning my bathroom in the morning and kids were not interrupting me while I did it.  And the reason that I could do that is because a teenager who I go to church with was downstairs playing with my kids for 3 hours for free and she’s coming back tomorrow to do the same thing!

Before I go on I want to say that my personal faith is rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ and not in the fringe benefits.  If all the wonderful things that I am about to write about didn’t exist, I’d still be a Mormon (You can read about all the amazing things that I believe here). 

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Ila loves her belly button. 

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He’s not quite crawling, but he does this just about every time I put him down on the floor: 

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I hate being hot which makes Seattle a pretty good place for me to live.  The only bad part is that when it does get hot (usually about 1 week in the summer), most people around here don’t have AC.  So when the weather report was predicting that Thursday and Friday would be the hottest days of the year, I was not looking forward to them. 

We planned a beach outing for the Friday (the post that I just wrote), but my only plan for Thursday was to go to the grocery store when it started getting hot.  Only you can’t spend all afternoon at the grocery store, especially when you have 5 kids.  Luckily I’m blessed with some awesome friends in our ward who called as I was unloading groceries to invite us to the pool.

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These pictures are from August 17th when we went to Newcastle Beach Park with my cousin, Lindsay , my friend Mandy , and my friend Megan and all of their kids.

Here’s what the park looks like:

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I have avoided signing my kids up for stuff, partly because I didn’t want to have to drive them to activities.  I especially didn’t want to have my kids signed up for so many things that I spent most of our after school hours driving around.  Only, somehow that has happened to me this year.

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It seems like Isaac’s birthday was a long time ago, but by the time I decided to schedule his yearly check-up, I couldn’t get an appointment with the doctor that I wanted until today.  So here are his stats:

Name:  Isaac Hinckley Cochran

Age:  8 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, and 4 days

Height:  47 1/4 “  8th percentile

Weight:  58 lbs  50th percentile

I couldn’t find a post with his last stats to compare.

A week ago we spent a Saturday in Portland visiting my sister. 

Here we are on the drive down (Charlotte and Ila are sleeping, Nicole is practicing her first primary talk, and Isaac is tracking our progress on Zach’s other GPS, it’s the yellow and black thing in his hand):You can only see the corner of Thomas’s blanket next to Ila.  Here’s a little time-lapse video Zach made of our drive:

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We haven’t been camping as a family since we camped at Zion when Nicole was a baby.  (This is why).  Now that Thomas is sleeping through the night, we thought we could try again.

We bought a tent on Craig’s list a few weeks ago.  Here’s Zach assembling it for the first time:

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Yesterday was Isaac and Charlotte’s first day of school. Each time I said the words  “first day of school,” Charlotte got a little mad and told me that it was not her first day because she had already been to school last year.  She would accept the phrase “first day of first grade.”  She can be a little stinker about semantics!

This is the only picture I got before school with no coats on.  Isaac wanted the shorts and long sleeves together, Charlotte liked the idea of wearing a dress:

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I just adore my little Thomas.  He is happy and sweet and all of his siblings love to make him smile, except for Nicole.  She’s mostly indifferent to him.  She has even tattled on him a few times (“Mom, Thomas is looking at me!”)

He’s not crawling yet, but he’s starting to get more mobile.  I put him down facing one way and often come back to find him turned around:

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I just can’t get enough of these two together!

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The following pictures were taken between August 4th and August 13th.  I did write a few other blog posts about things we did during those days, so this is only some of my pictures.

This is from before I threw away all the chalk in the house:

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I didn’t take many pictures from the day we went to the pool with some of our good friends while Zach was gone, but here are some of the few shots I took:

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On Thursday (while Zach was gone) I told the kids that we would finger paint if they were good.  We got some packing paper and finger paints out, but before we were even set up, Nicole grabbed the red and started squeezing it out and rubbing it all over herself.  She cleaned off her hands by rubbing them on her arms and legs:

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My last post was about our week without Zach.  The next few posts will include some of the pictures I took that week.  Starting with our Wednesday outing to my friend Megan’s house for a BBQ and fun outdoors with water to celebrate her baby’s first birthday.

Here’s Charlotte in the sandbox with the birthday boy:

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Zach serves as an advisor to the 16-18 year old young men at church and as part of that assignment, he had a chance to go to Canada for a week of sea kayaking at the beginning of August. (insert subtle hint that I think Zach should write a post about his trip on our blog) That meant that I had a week of taking care of the kids by myself.

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Here is a little video I took the other day of Thomas sitting.  He has gotten really good at sitting and almost never falls over.  In this video he kept rocking forward and putting his hands on the ground and it looks like he’s almost ready to take off and crawl:

Nicole has been putting items in her clothing lately.  I failed to get pictures of her walking around with toys hanging out of the front of her pants, but here are a few pictures that I did take of her with items in her clothing:

I had to take the water bottle out of the front of her dress to buckle her into her car seat and she cried when she couldn’t fit it back in there:You can’t actually tell in this picture, but she had a straw in her swimsuit and she got very mad when I tried to remove it.Here she is asleep with a kitchen timer in her shirt:We went swimming at a pool with friends and she refused to remove the Nerf Dart from her swimsuit:This one is only somewhat related.  She’s holding a chicken tender between her legs (I don’t know why she didn’t just set it on her plate while she took a drink):

Zach’s sister Bethani sent a little soldering project for Isaac’s birthday.  Isaac loves building and creating things, so he was thrilled.  It inspired him to start collecting odds and ends which he wants to build into a robot one day.  Here are some pictures of Zach and Isaac working on Isaac’s project:

Zach ended up doing the actual soldering part since he wasn’t quite ready to let Isaac work with such dangerous equipment.Here’s what they made:It’s a name tag that with LEDs that light up to spell Isaac’s name.  He can push the button on the front to turn it on and then modulate which LEDS light up.