Fall school Pictures

Here we have K, 1st & 2nd! We have to make sure to have a new color collared shirt for next year! More hair and more teeth this year!

Now Elizabeth is a bit miffed that her hair wasn't fixed just right and the clasp of her necklace is hanging to the side. Especially when the photographer spent 10 minutes with a BOY in her class, fixing his hair just right and even handing him a comb. The injustice of it all! (This is why we only spend $10 on school pictures)

Homecoming

We didn't make it to the game, but of course we took in the parade!

Fall Soccer

Grant still loves soccer. He had another great season with Coach Young! A few action shots.

Pumpkins & Archery

The pumpkin patch at the farm is one of Ima's projects and each year it gets better and bigger!! No doubt this was the best harvest yet, but just wait until next year. I think she has even bigger plans! It is important to us that the kids are involved in the pumpkin patch and the work that comes with it. Unfortunately the pumpkins were so big that the kids couldn't lift them. So Ima and I were left with a lot of the heavy lifting and let's be honest, we all know my mom is stronger than me!! But check out our haul! 

We had the kids in the back of the pick up rolling the pumpkins to the back. I thought this was a pretty cush job until I had to get in and do it and appreciated their little bodies crawling around back there rolling the pumpkins!

And we wrapped up with a little archery practice. These are the moments that I step outside of my mind and think "is this really my family?" Yes, yes it is! Our survival skills are really getting good! I am still in charge of keeping everything organized :)

He has since upgraded his tripod - all thought you must appreciate the ingenuity 

Tomatoes and more tomatoes

There reaches a point in the gardening season where one takes the tree shears and hacks the tomato plants at the bottom - because I could not "put up" any more tomatoes!! For the first time I canned this year - tomato sauce mainly and a few salsas (because I got bored with the sauce). It takes so much time and seems never ending. However, the final product is amazing and I fear my family may become tomato sauce snobs. One night I made fresh pasta and we had garden sauce with it and we were all pretty much in a food coma. Now that I know the result is good and worth it, perhaps I will be more anxious about the bushels of tomatoes next year!

Brandon's First RV Trip

Brandon wasn't able to join us for RV'ing at spring break, but Ima and Pops arranged for a fall trip for  a St. Louis weekend RV get away and he was able to come! (We like to break him in slowly, just a few nights at a time!)

Ima is always up for a game of Qwirkle 

The RV park had a surrey you could rent - of course we had to do it! The big boys were at the archery range. Ima and I did a lot of peddling but we had a lot of laughs and there were no near death experiences!

In the top bunk 

Co-pilot

It's always fun to arrive at camp in the dark ;)

We did not bring home a win, but it was fun!

Miniature Doll House Room

We started this project in Feb, the 24th to be exact. We completed it in September. This idea had to cook in the oven for a long time!! But once we took another look at it this fall the plans all came together. Elizabeth will listen to ideas, but in the end she always has her own artistic plan in her head. The biggest change she made was to do the flooring different. She had originally painted a wood plank floor and scaling is not an easy concept to explain! She finally concluded that it just wasn't right (the planks were way too big!) and she settled for the cork floor. We used a lot of scrap book paper to decorate (the picture framed flower, the sky in the window, the wall paper!). She had lot of fun putting it all together. I am really glad we only had a room to do and not a whole house...that would take a lot of time, patience and money! This was the perfect size project, even if it took over 6 months to complete!