Number Five is on His Way

Surprise to y'all! The battle of the sexes has been somewhat won--for the time being. John has convinced Kelsey that having a new baby brother really would be better than getting a new baby sister. I think Bekah doesn't really care either way. She loves playing with Kelsey and a new baby wouldn't be someone to play with for a few years anyway.

But anyway, in about five months, we should count seven in our household. That's how many seat belts we have in the van. Time to upgrade?

I love little baby feet!

Autumn Leaves and the Kids

It's been a pretty mild Autumn this year and the leaves have been pretty slow to fall near our home. The maple trees across the street have finally all turned yellow and are dropping their leaves. But the sycamore trees in front of our house are barely starting to turn brown. We'll see how quickly that changes after the next couple of days when the cold storm finally hits.

The kids have loved going across the street to pile up leaves and jump in them. Jack loves to run through them and listen to the crunch! Kelsey and Bekah pretend they have bouquets of flowers and they love to throw them in the air to see them fall again. It's been lots of fun to see them playing.

Shawn and I were remembering back to our first home with the Box Elder tree that dumped bags full of leaves on our lawn. We had such fun piling them together to let John play in them. Ah well. Memories and photos are what we keep of that. But it's great to see all of the kids enjoying the changing seasons.

Happy Halloween

To all of you ghosts and ghouls, we wish you a Happy Halloween! It's a few days late, but here's some of the highlights of our kids' experience. I have to say, it turned out better than we expected...since it was thundering and pouring at 1730 when we had planned to get started. By 1800, it had cleared enough that we thought we'd get a few houses in before the rain would start again. Luckily, it didn't rain again while we were gathering candy.

John forgot to wait for his sisters and Jack was always at the rear. But we had Jack trained by the end of the night to say "thank you", in his own way. It was fun and we got quite the haul. Poor Bekah's handle on her candy bucket broke it was so heavy! Sorry, no pictures of Jack in his frog costume. But I'm sure if you checked out last year's pictures, you can see Bekah in the same costume Jack wore this year.

The kids picked out their own designs for the pumpkins and I got the privilege of gutting, cleaning, and carving the jack-o-lanterns. Not too bad...since I had kids bumping and hovering over me during the sawing process. Jack got the bat and the moon; Bekah's became the owl when Jack broke the frowning jack-o-lantern; John chose the flaming pumpkin; and Kelsey chose the witch. It was fun! Hope you had a fun Halloween too!