November Blur

Holy Moly! This month has flown by. I feel like time goes by so quickly and I struggle to keep up. We were able to spend Thanksgiving with our adopted family here in St. Louis. Boy do we count ourselves blessed to know the Preston family. It's not just because they invited us to spend the holidays with them, but they are some of the most humble, generous and kind people that I know and seriously fun to be with! We missed our families a lot this season but we are sure glad to love and be loved by others too!
Thanksgiving week was so nice, mostly because David was home for five days straight. I sure love that guy! It was great to spend time together doing things that we love. Here are some of the highlights:


Swinging in the backyard is a favorite here at our house. As soon as Caleb gets home from school, he makes a beeline straight for the swing. If Emeline sees anyone on there, she expects to join them immediately.
Oh yes, and hours and hours of marble creations! I have very fond memories of building these at my Grandpa Allen's house. Our kids have loved them too and it keeps them busy on the freezing cold November days.


Typical Emeline look. She pulls out this whopper and I am a goner. She is still trying to get teeth and learn to sleep through the night, but during the day, she is a blast. She is WILD but we love her that way! I cannot count the number of times I have read Hand Hand Fingers Thumb in the past month. She LOVES it and calls it "Apple" because "Hand picks an apple.." It's not the worst book to read ten times a day I guess :)

We headed out to the zoo with the Prestons on one of the days. It was a really good day to go. The weather wasn't too bad. There was tons of fog in the morning but then it burned off and there were a lot of animals out and being really active.


We all headed over to the park on another day to play and take some pictures. It was a beautiful sunset and I am learning more and more on how to work my camera. I am loving it! These are some of my favorite shots.

box hat

Things That Fly

So far, this November has brought a lot of good family time. I am really enjoying these fun days with my children and discovering how grown up they are getting. Making a giant leaf pile in the back may bring out the kid in everyone, however, especially with the size of our fall leaf pile. David brought his leaf blower home from work (another one of those mid-west things we didn't know we needed to have but don't want to pay for :) and boy am I glad it's a heavy duty one. The leaves are EVERYWHERE! We are literally up to our eyeballs in leaves. Unfortunately we are too lazy to bag them and put them out on the curb so they are still piled up in a corner of the backyard. We are praying Valley Park does leaf vacuuming again this year so we can just drag them out to the front on a giant tarp. It's the only lazy way to do it.


 We also visited the Butterfly House on one of their free mornings. It is an incredible place and so much fun for the kids. Emmy was especially impressed and ran all over the place trying to grab all the butterflies. We were all really sweating by the end (it's 82 degrees and super humid). We will definitely be returning next month. Anyone want to join us?

Halloween-ween

This year's Halloween was all about the ninjas! We started the festivities by carving pumpkins for Family Home Evening. Caleb was very proud of doing the designing and carving all by himself, although he thought the guts were pretty disgusting. Jake had fun poking holes in his pumpkin and Emmy liked standing on the chairs. While I am not a huge fan of Halloween, I do LOVE to carve pumpkins! 
Last year for costumes, I stressed myself out big time. So this year, we decided not to spend any money on them and to wear what we had in the house. To our wonderful surprise, we had 3 awesome ninja costumes that fit each one of my children! Thank you David for saving those! Not to mention that Jake is huge into Ninjago right now and wanted to be a ninja anyway. Hooray! Costumes down, Trick-or-treating to go. We decided to drive over to our friends house to share some delicious chili and cake cornbread. Emmy decided she didn't like the trick-or-treating (basically screamed every time someone new gave her candy) so I stayed with her while David took the boys around. Our friends live in a neighborhood without a lot of kids so everyone was dishing out the candy by the handfuls. Here I was thinking that less candy would be a good thing and they would only need to go to a few houses and they came back with full buckets! Oh well, more to share with Mom and Dad!