Carter's book

I love this!  Don't know why the pictures came in sideways... And yes, Carter must think he's Asian because he wrote the book back to front.

 

 The Book of Ghost.  Notice he scratched out Mormon and drew a ghost instead. haha

Page one: Ghost says "YOU".  Little man says "Aaaaaa"

 Page 2: Ghost says "Arrrr." Little man says "Aaaaa."

 Page 3: More and bigger Ghosts.  Smaller guy,still saying "Aaaa"

Page 4: More ghosts.  Man getting smaller. Notice he has not only numbered each page, but also drawn a little ghost with each number.  Absolutely darling.

 Page 5: Now there is a spider.  Man is still small. Words say "Yaaaaaa" and "ONO" translation: Oh No!

Page 6: Ghosts, mean giants, 2 spiders, small man.

 This part cracks me up. Page 7 and 8 show a huge ghost and then an arrow pointing to a dot.  The dot is the man.  hahahaaa.

 Page 9: Spider is so big only it's legs make the page.  Arrow indicates dot which is the man.

Page 10: self explanatory.

The best, right??

Megs

Megan has always ALWAYS been the hardest of our children to get to go to sleep at night.  That girl.  She drives us crazy sometimes! Sometimes being understated.  One night she sat at the top of the stairs and cried and whined because she wanted something.  Water for the hundredth time, probably. Anyways. we'd already been up to her like 5 times, so we decided to just ignore her.  Like 3 hours later when we were headed to bed, this is what we found.  Oh geez.  That girl.  I'm surprised she never fell.  She is so pretty though.  Kids are darling when they are asleep. :)

 

Decorating Pumpkins and Cookies

The kids were too impatient (awhile back, of course) to wait until closer to Halloween to carve their pumpkins (I didn't want them to rot), so instead we sat down one morning and painted away!

The kids had lots of fun and surprisingly didn't get too messy.  Derrick had the biggest pumpkin, and his had the least amount of paint on it.  go figure.  Meg's was the smallest pumpkin, and it BY FAR had the most paint.  That baby took forever and a day to dry.  Carter's was painted with lots of different faces all around it.  It's fun seeing each kid and their progression as they get older. 

Later that night we decided to decorate sugar cookies.  YUM.  I didn't have a chance to buy those nifty little frosting decorating colors, so I had to make my own.  I couldn't quite make black, but am pretty darn impressed with the gray that I mixed up.  It's the simple things in life.

 

 Yeah, I'm sure you've figured it out, but just in case, Derrick did NOT draw the leaves and vine on his. haha.

 Lovin' the unibrow on Carter's.

 I included this pic because I love that Carter has his tongue out while concentrating on his art. :)

 Proof that they do love each other.

Love this pose. hahahaaa.

Great Wolf Lodge

Bo had vacation two weeks ago, and since we knew we wouldn't be traveling to Washington, or some other place, we decided to see what the area nearby had to offer.  Some friends had recently traveled to Cincinnati (2 hours away) to go to the Great Wolf Lodge and told us how fun it was.  We figured, why not??  At first we were going to keep this trip a secret and surprise the kiddos, but then Bo and I couldn't stand waiting, so we just went ahead and told them.  Bad idea in that they kept bugging us as to when we were going to go, good idea in that they were SOOOO PUMPED when that day came!

So Bo and I were trying to work out the times of when we could get in the room, when we could actually swim, would we have time to visit IKEA before ( I love that store) we went to the lodge, and when to leave home to actually drive the 2 hours to get to Cincinnati, that we decided maybe the least stressful thing would be to get a cheap hotel in Ohio the night before, and then not have to worry about being rushed. As soon as that was decided, I suddenly remembered that we had some friends, Jenn and Kyle Timmerman, that had recently moved to Ohio, looked up where they were, and realized they weren't that far away.  Oh i was sooooo excited when I discovered we would get to visit them!  We ended up staying the night with them and our kids had the best time playing with Kyle and Jenn's little boy, Max, while Bo and I were in heaven chatting it up with our friends and holding their darling baby Oliver. Unfortunately I got NO pics.  Darn it, I'll just have to go visit again! Twist my arm.



Great Wolf Lodge was the best!  Our family was in love with the place.  First off, that place is HUGE. There were tons of different sections.  There were like 12 different water slides, some of them only for kids under "48, some only for people taller than that, and the rest were in between.  There was a lazy river, where you could float on tubes, or not. There was a wave pool, Carter's favorite.  There was a huge water fort.  There were also a couple just plain swimming places.  Megs and Derrick spent most of their time in between the little kid pool, which was huge, and the wave pool.  Carter pretty much went everywhere, but as mentioned before, he really REALLY loved the wave pool.  Megan went on the little kid slides over and over and over again.  Derrick loved playing with the little fountains coming out of the ground.  I loved going down the slides with Carter, and I think that might have been Bo's favorite part too.

Pretty much the trip went like this:  We got into the hotel at 1:30 and swam till about 5, when we stopped to take a dinner break.  We went back to swim from about 6 to 7 pm and then Carter and Megan and I went to this kids club room where they got to make masks and color.  After that it was bedtime.  We pretty much all of us were zonked out by 9.  The next day we went to breakfast at an IHOP nearby, and then back to swimming from about 10 am to 1:30 pm.  At about that time in the afternoon the kids were DONE.  They loved the place, but they were tired, and they were done having their toes and fingers being raisins. :)  We changed, left, went to Mc Donald's for lunch, and heading home.  I think that was the quietest drive I've ever been on.  The kids never took a nap, but they were still out of it.  Carter even commented on it at one point. hahaa. 

So in order to do the slides, which the little kids couldn't go on, but Carter could, Bo and I had to pretty much be split up the whole time.  I'd go on a ride with Carter and Bo would watch the other two, then we'd switch and Bo would head off with Carter to some other rides.  While it worked, and we still had lots of fun, we both agree that next time we go, because we're definitely going again, that we definitely need to go with another family.  Carter could use another buddy, his age, to fall off the tubes with in the wave pool, Megan could use a little slide friend to race with, and Bo and I would have fun going down other slides together along with just some good chatting time with friends. It was a fun trip though and we had blast.  Good family times.  Awesome family times. 

Partying in the room.

The wave pool! No waves yet. They come on every 15 min. 

You could take tubes in the wave pool.  Megan loved playing in the super shallow area on them.

Derrick loving the fountains.

These were the only two slides, besides the kids ones, that you didn't need water tubes.

The yellow slide was Carter's and my favorite. We refer to it as the toilet bowl slide, because you go round and round in that bowl until at the bottom you go through this little hole.

I love this picture and the way it got the wave going over Carter.

And the hot tub, who can forget the hot tub! Or as Megan likes to call it, "the warm pool." 

Tea Party

These two can often be found playing in the "kitchen" or having tea parties.  I love it. They will seriously play for hours. :)

The Pumpkin Patch!

A couple of Saturdays ago, we decided to take the kids to go get pumpkins after their soccer games.  Derrick ended up falling asleep right as we got there, of course, so only Megan and Carter got to participate in picking out their pumpkins.  I think Carter went through like five choices before finally settling on one.  Megan picked hers out with Bo right on the first try.  That girl knows her mind. :)

We are loving the Fall weather and all things Fall related!!  We have our pumpkins on our front porch, just waiting to be painted and/or carved (yes, it's been awhile, but we've been busy!). We've busted out the hot chocolate, made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, made pumpkin bread (a couple of times....), and even have had our traditional sugar cookies with the pumpkins in the middle (store bought... I'm not that talented).  Yes, we are ready for Fall!!!

 

You can tell Bo is having the time of his life.  He is definitely in his element. :)

Field trip to the zoo

For Megan's preschool, we are trying to do a field trip every month.  For September we went to the zoo!  Meg's had lots of fun hanging out with her friends and learning the signs for each animal.

 

 The group!  Megs, Eliza, Jacob, and Alex....with a couple of mom's in the background.  The kids are watching the flamingos in this shot.  The birds were really close to the fence.

 

 Derrick tried "racing the cheetah" for the first time on this trip.  He was all into it until the flash of the camera the race has went off.  At the flash he stopped, turned around, and ran back to me bawling.  He's a very sensitive little guy, and doesn't deal well with scares or attention. :)