The Banks Family: Wildfire

Teagan is now 21-months old and is talking up a storm. She's saying some phrases like "where are you" and "there it is", linking words together, and even attempting to sing songs. She's also very agile and adventurous and will climb up on the big structures at the park and basically copy everything Claudia does. She loves to draw, which she calls "color" and has moved on from scribbles to scribble-circles, and prefers the color blue. She has added some familiar aversions, like sand on her feet or water on her face. She used to tolerate these, whereas Claudia never did until she was 4, so I was a bit surprised by the change, but at least I know how to deal with them. She's also been sick a lot this summer, which is a bummer. She's the kind of kid that gets a high fever when she gets sick and she's had 5 different viruses this spring/summer, including roseola, and some of her illnesses have lasted up to a week. Thank goodness she's not in daycare.

I'm so proud of Claudia's swimming skills. She continues to doggy-paddle confidently around the pool and with the addition of goggles, has been able to swim with her face in the water blowing bubbles out her nose. She's also very confident on a tricycle, bicycle with training wheels, and scooter this summer. And she can pump herself on the swing now, which is huge for us because the swings are her favorite thing at the park, but it's hard to manage pushing both kids. She's always been cautious with her large motor skills and I'm excited that she's now enjoying them.

On June 22nd Gina & Chase got married! They had it on their farm in Sultan. Chase built a huge garage where the reception was held and they both did an amazing job getting the property ready, including building a fence and going through three riding lawn mowers to get the grass nice for the ceremony. Gina looked beautiful of course, and Claudia and Addison were exceptionally cute flower girls.

Now after all this good news, there were a few unfortunate things that happened this summer. First, Glen's car got broken into and then the thieves stole my car. The police did recover it a week later, but it was totally stripped of all our possessions including the carseats and kids toys, which was quite a violation. Then not a week later, the thieves stole it again. Ugh! So my insurance company paid me out the value of the car. In a twist of good luck, my friend sold me her car for a bargain. It needed a little work, but Chase and Glen fixed it up and now I have a Subaru Forester! Bye bye red Mazda3. Shortly after this, Glen got laid off from his job at the UW, on June 30th. We had notice, but it's always a depressing situation to lose your job before you have another one lined up. We've both been applying for as many jobs as we can and I'm proud to say after a lot of hard work and many interviews, I finally have a job offer! I start soon, so more details to come on that soon.

Our family had the month of July free with no jobs and no school, so we decided to head over to Alta Lake for a couple weeks to commiserate our situation and cheer ourselves up with some golf, sun, and a big beautiful house to hang out in. We even had our friends Alex & Laura and their two kids visit us for a long weekend. They live in Sheffield, England, but were in Seattle for a summer sabbatical (they're both scientists too). And I got to meet up with my friend Colleen and meet her two kids (they live in Wenatchee). It was super hot (around 100 degrees every day), so we spent a lot of time outside in the kiddie pool, sprinkler, or just playing in buckets of water. Claudia even golfed her first "round" of golf, pitching and putting 9 holes with Daddy. Everything was going really well until an ominous dark cloud of smoke came over us. There are always forest fires out there in the summer, mostly caused by lightening strikes. There were some nearby fires we were watching closely and after a second day of smokey conditions, we decided to head home the next morning. We went out to dinner in Chelan for our last night and as we were driving back to Pateros around 8pm, the sky started getting darker and we noticed a lot of cars driving south, the opposite to what we were. Just as we hit the welcome to Pateros sign, there was a road block and the whole hillside was on fire. It was super scary. Pateros was being evacuated because it was on fire. Later that night about 11pm, it hit Alta Lake. It all happened so fast that most people did not have time to pack up anything and the firefighters didn't even make it in. Houses just burned down somewhat randomly as embers fell on houses. We didn't even know what happened until the next morning, but 52 of 85 houses in the community burned down. By some amazing stroke of luck, my parents' house was saved as were all of our family friends, Dan & Diane, Mike & Sharon, and Butch & Linda. The fire (called the Carlton Complex) ended up burning 300,000 acres and is now the largest fire in WA state history. It's been a month since the fire and we're still so sad about it.

I will start with the cheery photos first:

With cousin Asher.

With friend Rosie.

With friend Andrew.

Here's the ominously dark sky at Lake Chelan Winery. A half hour later we would see the hillside on fire and be evacuated and driving back to Seattle.