A very boo-ti-ful time of year. :)

This year we cheated and I bought "funkins" instead of pumpkins. There are no guts to clean out, and they don't rot, and can keep them from year to year. :) Don't know if we'll do that every year, but last year we had rotting pumpkins on Tor T night and didn't want that this year.

We had our 4th annual hot dog trick or treat with our friends from church and we all had so much fun. Our place was hoppin.

And so for the day I was Mom to:

A Pirate
Lady Gwenivere (we're not allowed to call her a princess anymore. We've been informed that princesses are for babies)

And Captain Underpants.

that's all!

New baby lovins... Elliot's Big Day

Elliot Lee. In the family Baptizing Gown. :)
The Baptizing.


The Proud Big Brother Sam.

Soggy, cold and oh so fun

We signed up for adventure day at Hawk mountain for the boy. His whole reason for wanting to joing the cub scouts was so that he could do archery, and then there was BB gun and BB gun safety- which he was over the top about.

Seeing the weather forcast, I know it's going to rain and I know Lilly won't be happy, so she spent the day with Dean and Kathy. Abby, Me, & Caleb head up on our own. We get there and it's cold and windy and not quite 8:30 am. We start walking around and getting an idea of where everything was.

And that's when the heavens opened up and started to pour.



So we headed to a pavillion and waited till it was our time to go to campfire safety.



Sure enough- it stopped raining for part of the morning. But as luck would have it the only time was actually nice out was when we were in covered activites. Other than that it poured. And Poured. And poured.

And then there was the fishing incident. I don't fish. I gag at the thought of worms and fish scales. And we had just finished lunch. Yeah- it was not fun- at all. We didn't stay long at the lake and headed to the gift shop instead.

So the end of the day the rain was not only pouring, but the wind was whipping it at you and so if you did find a covered spot, you were still getting soaked and the rain just pelted at you and stung.

But we stayed. It was time for archery and the boy did not want to miss that.




This was the highlight of the day. They LOVED this. Both of them hit the target twice out of 6 shots. I don't think they realized it's a lot harder than it looks. I wish we could have stayed and did more, but it was time to move on to BB gun saftety and shooting.

We walked up the mountain and by this point we are something like drowded rats in winter coats. After finding out we would have to stand an hour in the drenching cold rain, Caleb decides that he's done and wants to go home instead of shoot BB's.

In the 20 minutes it took us to get back to the van, our winter coats were completly soaked. Our Clothes underneath were completely soaked. And then we had to sit, soaked, for nearly an hour to get home.

Yeah. We came home, showered and changed and cuddled up in blankets, ordered a pizza and waited for Dad to come home.


Fun memories, even if they were rain soaked, it was a lot of fun. :)

Dance the night away...

Friday was Abby's Monster mash bash. A huge social event in the life of a sixth grader.





And I had the privlege of taking three 11 year old girls to the dance. It was intense and yet, so much fun to overhear the topics of conversations: Boys, Bands and clothes- typical girl stuff. :)

Overheard

At the scout Pack meeting's Fire Prevention night.

Really thought out questions like:

"how much does your gear weight"

and

"What is Carbon Monoxide"

And

"What do you do if you have a pet in the house and the house is on fire"

And then Caleb gets antsy and starts wiggling his hand hoping he gets picked to ask a question.

He finally does and this is what he asks:

"What do you do when you house blows up?" And then he starts giggling. I have to say the firemen laughed with every one else and said you better hope you aren't in the building, b/c explosions are not something you want to be around.

Me? I'm in the back of the crowd and I just shake my head. Why? Becuase I know in Caleb's mind he wasn't thinking about fire safety. He was thinking "what if Darth Vader and OB1 came to my house and started fighting and blew it up."

So I asked him in the car on the way home, why he was concerned about his house blowing up. His reply? "So I know how to play star wars".

Yeah.

Fire Prevention Month

Our kids love fire prevention month. There is always something fun going on. This year we went to an open house and got to sit in trucks, get their ID's taken, check out all the cool tools and hang with the fire fighters for the morning.

Lots of fun.

Counting Crows, literally...

Peddler's villiage was having a scarecrow competion going on and so we went there to check it out after church on sunday.

These are the kids favorite:

Wishful thinking?

Last week, Caleb came home with a mid-term report. His grades are fine and although he is doing better behivior wise- the teacher still thinks that there is room for improvement.

So I made a deal with him. If he could go one month without being disruptive, and his next report told me so, I would let him pick out a star wars action figure. I know, bribing is probably not the best way to deal with this, but I'm feeling for his teacher. She's pregnant in her third trimester and we're going to be transitioning a sub in and then transitioning back to his teacher in the spring. The boy does not deal with change very well, so I was hoping that the Action figures would give him the incentive to work through his disruptiveness and be good. If any thing can get him to change, it would be star wars.

So we fast forward to this morning. He sneaks in my room and puts this in my pillow next to my sleeping face.



Apparently, he thought he could really cash in on this offer of good behavior = toys.

Yeah.


The boy is weird.

Tracking the kids.

We recently got keys to use the school track. It's a nice to walk on b/c it's rubbery under your feet and the kids like to run around, run up and down the bleachers and pretty much wear themselves out.










I didn't get a lot of pictures of the boy... I'm to slow for him and he runs ahead and does his own thing- and that's fine. :)

It was gorgous weather. The kind where you just want to be outside all day and so this is what we did for our morning fun. Lilly came home and was so tuckered out she didn't fight me and took a 3 hour nap. Yeah, I think I wore her out just a *wee* bigt.

A fall festival :)

Caleb & Lilly's school has an APT festival and this year was a pretty good one. It didn't rain and so it was mainly outside.

The highlight of the night was the horseback rides. Both Lilly and Caleb both have been wanting to ride horses lately and so we waited in the long line in the sun and they had their turn on the ponies.





But in addition to this you could stuff a scarecrow, Make bookmarks and halloween deocrations, Ring tosses, rubber ducky fishing, pumpkin rolling a moon bounce and potato sack races.

Such fun.




I'm glad we got to go. Last year we couldn't because of my surgery and the year before it was crazy crowded inside b/c of an all day rain.

Just another reason why we love october!

Hitting the courts

I found a Tennis Raquet for Caleb today and so we decided to go and hit some balls around the court no that everyone has a raquet.

The kids are getting much better. They are actually hitting balls across the net (well, Caleb and Abby are... Lilly not so much) We still can't play a game yet, but we did have a couple of volley's which is more than we did last year at this time.

Two thumbs up...

I've been deep in the trenches of kids clothes this past week.

Sorting out what doesn't fit any more and seeing what we have stored that fits, what doesn't fit yet and what is warm enough for fall/winter.

Ugh. It's my most hated chore. Seriously, I think I'd ranther scrub the bathroom than do clothing switches.

Caleb's was rather easy. Abby's was more time consuming but not so bad. It's Lilly that is the one that takes forever.

Not only has she grown like a weed over the summer- so she has a ton of clothes she grew out of, but she is wearing two different sizes as her top half of her body is bigger than the bottom half. Then we have to see that most of her clothing is saved from the days of Abby and so there is shrikage and streching to deal with and so it just makes my job even harder.

Not to mention the storage space she takes up. She has 2 and a half tubs of clothes waiting for her to grow into. Our house isn't that big and the storage is limites so I thought I'd give the space bag Tote a try.

and wowsers. We went from 2 and a half tubs (the size of the one the Right) to one tote.



Yeah. I'm gonna buy one every pay and use them for all the clothing- then hopefully we will have half our storage closet empty. Wouldn't that be nice.

That's all!

Monday is Date Day...

And today our Date had three extra people tagggin along since there was no school.

We had so much fun.

First stop was bowling. We took advantage of our local alley's Monday's half price games.

Then we made a stop at our favorite store on earth.


We're getting ideas to completely organize the house. We would like another bookshelf down stairs and the girls room is full of bulky furniture, so we're looking to get them some cubbies and new dresser/Desk combos. Then if we have some moo-la left over, I'm gonna look into getting a new shelving unit for the bedroom to better store my scrapping stuff in- as what I have isn't really working.

And on our trip we found out a very important piece of info. Going to IKEA on a weekend is mayhem and full of people every where you turn. Going to IKEA on a Monday is no sweat. There was barely anyone there to move around and the kids had so much more of a good relaxed time in their playland b/c they were the only ones there! That has definatley never happened before.

And when there is no one else around you can find a clearence section! (Which I never even knew they had b/c it's off in a corner that is always chalk full of people) And so our kids each got a new blanket for their bed for a whole $2.





And I got some new candles to replace the two that I had burnt out this week- both a buck. :) Love good deals like that. :)

And so we ended our day with a trip to the outlets to find Big Sexy some undergaurd for the cold weather. something along the lines of this: Being that he'll be out in the cold doing work on lines- we thought something like this might come in handy.

However- we left the store with nothing. THere was not a thing under $40 and being that he would need at least three that put it right out of our price range. We'll just invest in some long johns for the time being and re-assess next year to see if something more is needed.

And that was our day. The kids were thrilled to get out and play and it was our best columbus day ever. :)

That's all for now.