Thanksgiving

The kids had the whole week off for Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, it rained the first 2 days of the break. The day before Thanksgiving, we headed to the zoo, one of their favorite places before we moved. Since it was still kind of chilly and right before a big holiday, the zoo was kind of empty. That was nice.

These little guys are a family favorite. They are a lot of fun to watch too. And they have a little observation bubble to get an up close look at the meercats.

Here's Sophia on the first ride of the carousel.

The elephants were probably the most active of all of the animals.

The tall and graceful giraffe.

Here is Clara on the second ride of the day. Both times she was a little apprehensive, but still enjoyed the ride.

Then for Thanksgiving day we had 3 other families over for dinner. These families we have known for years so they are more like family than friends. It was a lot of fun. 14 kids and 8 adults made for a full house. We missed our downstairs playroom to send the kids to.

Fall Time

There are two times a year I wish I had a better camera, Autumn and Spring. Here are some of my attempts to make do and take some more artistic pictures. Did you know my dream job for the longest time was to be National Geographic photographer? Getting paid to take pictures and travel to interesting places...

We have a couple water maples in our yard that had some good leaves for making piles and jumping in.

Halloween

This year we had a black cat (again=easy), a stylish witch, Percy from the Percy Jackson series (no picture--Ethan just wore an orange shirt with 'Camp Half-Blood' written on it) and a USPH officer (Jakob wore Phil's fatigues--that Phil HAD to have but never had to wear).

Carving Pumpkins

Clara didn't want to help get the insides out, so I don't have any pictures of her. Whoops. As we were getting ready to carve, we heard the now traditional "Time for you lumberdummy, Jack." I thought I had told this story one time before on the blog, but I can't find it. When Ethan was first learning to read right around Halloween time, he yelled out, with knife in his hand as he was getting ready to carve his pumpkin, "Okay Jack, time for your lumberdummy." We had no idea what he was talking about so we got him to explain. He went to the bookshelf and pulled out the Calvin and Hobbes book with this cartoon in it. (All of the kids have honed their reading talents on "Calvin and Hobbes") So now it's tradition to say that when making the first cut into the pumpkin.

The end results and very lousy pictures. You notice I didn't even manage to get a picture of Clara helping to carve her pumpkin. I don't know how people manage to document everything. I was lucky to just get the pumpkins carved. We ended up with a Frankenstein (I'm reading the actual book with the boys, and they would want me to clarify that the monster was not actually Frankenstein, rather the creator of the monster), a kitty cat by moonlight, a tribute to Pac Man (the 'o' in game over is actually supposed to be pac man) and a scary face created by Sophia.

Pumpkin Picking

All four kids are actually in this picture. Clara just bent over at the wrong time. You can actually spy her little head if you look closely. We went out to a nearby farm one nice Saturday to find some pumpkins. While you could just pick one from the ones they had brought in, the kids opted to pick their own.

Here are the girls with their finds.

Some pretty yellow blooms. The one on top is a pumpkin blossom. There were also random sunflower like flowers growing throughout the pumpkin patch.

Around the farm there were some activities for the kids. The bin filled with corn was a big hit. I wonder where you could get a lot of corn to have a corn box at home instead of a sandbox. It certainly would be less messy.

Sophia's is still a long way off from 5 feet. I should have gotten a picture of each kid by the measuring stick. It would have been fun to see how they compare.

Cake Decorating Contest

Can you guess what book mine was based on? It won first place in the book category.

Sophia did a ladybug cake.

This is Ethan's, can you tell what his is?

For the kids category they had to do it all themselves. I thought they did pretty good.