An Erina kind of summer!

Well, contribute it to the fact, that growing up, in my house, we had many different people come and live at our house, that when the opportunity arose to have a Japanese foreign exchange student come stay at our house for a month, I talked my dear husband into letting her stay at our house,(this was especially great, since it meant that the downstairs bathroom now had a finished date). So we quickly signed up for a teenage girl...and picked her up with her traveling group at the end of July. Erina...so very cute, but she didn't speak any English! She smiled a lot, and we tried as hard as we could to help her feel welcomed, to feel like she was part of the family, and to communicate with her, but I'm still not sure how well we did. The best part was that we had to come up with activities to do, which was also the worst part, because I felt a lot of pressure to keep her entertained! But it helped to also provide my kids more activties, which was also difficult, because we were juggling everyone's schedules, especially Kate's, because she was just made the High School Soccer team, and she had to be to all of the practices, and then the games. Here are a few of the pics, of some of our various activities.

Went to downtown Salt Lake, to see Temple Square, then rode Trax to the Gateway
We went to the Bingham Copper Mine, to check that out... it had been raining, and they almost didn't let us go, but by the time we finished with the visitor center, it had stopped raining, so we got to see down into the open mining pit.
I must say, that our bowling alley is awesome! They did some program where "kids bowl free", you just had to pay for shoe rental, and you could bowl, so that was my life saver this summer! I thought I'd get to go bowling, but every time, something else came up, so I just dropped them off! I hope Erina liked to bowl!! (Never knew for sure, she never could tell us)