Halloween Kooks

Here are the kooks Jeremy works with. It's sad, but true.

Fall Activities - Park and Pumpkins

Last Friday the kids were out of school and it was a perfectly warm, fall day. I decided it would be a perfect opportunity to take them to the park before we can't go anymore. They all had so much fun! Cathy and her kids met us there to play.

This is the best part about watching kids go down these slides - the HAIR! It's so cute! :) They don't know why we are watching them and smiling so big!

Athena and Ashley spent a lot of time on their acorn collection. At the end of the park trip, Athena was so disappointed that we couldn't take some home. She did, actually, enjoy that luxury a couple of years ago. Once we got them home, the worms that live inside the acorns ate through the acorns and ended up all over my kitchen counter. I didn't know this would happen and only learned of the truth after the gruesome discovery. NEVER AGAIN ATHENA! Sorry.

Uh . . . but the collection was still fun. :)

Could we get any more people on this slide, please? They are all SO CUTE!

Our next fall activity was to carve pumpkins. We did this last night for Family Home Evening. Athena, Samantha, and Nathan LOVED getting their hands all goopy in the pumpkins.

I ended up cutting Samantha and Nathan's pumpkins, and Jeremy cut Athena's.

Here is the finished product, out on the porch! I mean the pumpkins, not the kids. Samantha chose to have hers be a mad face, Nathan wanted Jack Skellington - the "pumpkin king", and Athena wanted a traditional jack-o-lantern face. Athena actually did the artwork for hers and Jeremy did the cutting. Good job Athena!

Here is one last clip just to show how much fun we had. There is no sound because we took this video with our digital camera, but please, feel free to enjoy the movement.

Oh, I have to explain why Athena started out looking so goofy in this video. She thought Jeremy was going to snap a photo and was holding her pose. LOL!

More Potty Talk

I have to laugh about this - we were out shopping for basement stuff this weekend and lo and behold, we carted along a training potty! I've never done this before, but it really worked! We did give it a good try having Nathan use the store bathrooms, but to no avail. So each time Jeremy ended up taking Nathan out to the van to use his own private stall.

We did have an exciting success, though. At church there is a little kid-sized porcelain, flushable toilet in the nursery. It's really quite cute. Anyway, at church I took Nathan in there and he was so excited about the potty his size that was like Mom and Dad's that he just couldn't go. He loved the room it was in and spent all of his time admiring the walls, the light, the light switch, the funny little potty, the sink his size, and so on. He loved it so much that he forgot he needed to go. So, about an hour later, he said he needed to go again, so Jeremy took him back to that lovely little room and Nathan went and hopped right on that potty and went potty. HOORAY!

Then later that day we were at a birthday party and he actually went two times in another big potty while we were out. Jeremy told him that it was just like the other potty in the church and he went and hopped right up and went! We'll see if that solves our public toilet problem for the future. :)

Potty Time!!

OH JOY

The time has come. It is finally time to potty train Nathan. This is seriously my least favorite part about raising little kids. My very least! He has actually been ready to potty train for quite some time, but I had to hold him off until after our Mexico trip. He is actually doing pretty good for a first-timer.

Yesterday I had him watch the Elmo potty time clip on sesamestreet.com and he sat and watched it for about 45 minutes. It's cute, every time Elmo has to go to the bathroom, Nathan has to push a key on the keyboard to send him to the potty. Nate sits and watches and waits until his important time to push the key. After watching that, Nathan has done pretty good about remembering to stop what he is doing and go.

The only downside to potty training Nathan, really, is that we are gone a lot. He absolutely refuses to go potty anywhere but on his little portable potty. I'm thinking of just making that a permanent fixture to the van. Yesterday we were in Macey's doing some grocery shopping when he had to go. I had Jeremy take him and they came back 5 minutes later. Jeremy said Nate refused to use that potty. I didn't want him to have an accident so I decided to give it a whirl. I took him into the bathroom at Macey's and spent about 10 minutes in the stall with him talking to him, calming him down during his hysterics, sitting him on the potty, talking to him some more, etc etc. I FINALLY got him to sit on the potty for a second. No sooner was he on the potty than it did its automatic flush! Nathan came UNGLUED!!! He couldn't get off that thing fast enough. I figured we were done at that point and nothing more was going to come of being in the bathroom, so we left.

Surprisingly, he was able to hold it all the way until we got home - about another half hour. That experience makes me dread leaving the house to do anything this weekend. If you see us walking from store to store toting a potty, you will now know why.

First Snow and the Flu

We saw our first real snow at our house when we woke up on Sunday morning. It's crazy! It shouldn't do this in mid-October. It did look really pretty, though.

This is my favorite - I thought it looked really pretty on the roses. Jeremy took these pictures. He gets so excited about snow.

This is our little drummer boy. He was so excited that he was playing the "BUMS"! That's what he called it.

This week our family has been slammed by the flu. I was down all day yesterday and today Samantha had to stay home from school. It's such a bummer! I hope everyone doesn't get it and it stops with us 2.

I really appreciated Jeremy yesterday. He came home from work and cleaned the whole house because I had been sick and the house was quite neglected. What an awesome husband to help out. :) I love him!!

Some Great Wig Fun

Yesterday we went and bought the finishing touches to what will be the girl's costumes. Athena wants to be Belle and Samantha wants to be Sleeping Beauty, but they both have the wrong color of hair to be their princess. So we solved that problem. Thanks Kmart. :)

Look at those princess beauties! I think these wigs are so funny!!

Here is a shot from behind of the divas . . .


Oops! I mean, DIVO! LOL!

I love my kids!!!

I Made Bread!

Yesterday I made my first loaves of wheat bread. I was surprised to have them turn out to be quite delicious. I was expecting to harvest bricks from the oven since it was my first time. It was so easy to make and the first loaf of hot bread was gobbled up within 10 minutes by my ravenous family. I didn't even have time to take a picture. I'll have to make it again and take some pictures. I even used home-ground wheat.

Darn, I've become domesticated. Once you make your own wheat bread, that's it.