October

It has been a busy month so I thought I'd throw a few pictures at you so you can see why we have been so unavailable. The first thing that happened was signing Theo up for soccer. While it was fun it pretty much filled our Sunday afternoons. Thankfully this week is a week off and next week is his last practice/game. I want to stop for a short commercial. i9 Sports rocks! While it did tie up almost every Sunday for the last 6 weeks it was only Sunday afternoon. His practice and his game both happened, back to back, on the same day. I loved it! His coaches were awesome and so amazingly patient with my boy who likes nothing more than to hang himself up in the net when it is his turn to be goalie. The super aggressive player we saw when he was 4 has sadly departed and now he is an, um, super entertaining player. If I were to pick an animal that represents my child I'd pick the otter. We have decided that there must be something terribly fun about falling down on every play. The coaches quickly got used to that and just told him to get up. Poking fun aside, he really did learn a lot and improve.


We spent two weekends camping this month. Leah's AHG troop went to High Falls in South GA for an absolutely gorgeous weekend outdoors. She got really good with her fire building and the two of us enjoyed our time together. Aside from the hike where she ended up breaking a small bone in her foot the weekend was as close to perfect as it could get.

Theo's cub scout troop went to Scoutland in Gainesville, GA. It has to be my least favorite place to camp but I just love the group of scouts he is a part of so that makes it tolerable. If they would just upgrade their bathrooms I wouldn't mind the hike to the potties. On the plus side they always have fun things for the boys to do. Theo's favorites are archery...

and the BB gun range. He got a bull's eye so they put his stamp on his forehead. Jeff had to bribe him with a lady bug to get him to willingly pose for a photo. Oh, and I shouldn't forget his other favorite....the campfire. He just loves to burn things! What a family of pyromaniacs we are. :-)

After the camping came the Sugar Hill Fall Festival and Parade. While we didn't hang around for the festival, the parade was lots of fun. Leah wasn't allowed to walk very far but had fun throwing candy from the truck.

My favorite thing about fall is watching my kids dig the gunk out of the pumpkins.

This is Leah's creation:

and this is Theo's handiwork:

We double dipped in the candy fun this year. We went to Cartersville for three birthdays- Crawford's, Alexandra's, and mine- and stayed on to have some trick or treat fun. Alexandra's neighborhood has 400 homes so we did just one section of it. We were out for about 2 hours and the kids had a great time.

We figured we had missed the action in our own neighborhood but found that we hadn't so the kids went out again on Sunday night. When all the candy that was to be eaten was eaten and the favorite small stash was set aside we had almost 6 pounds of candy to donate to the soldiers! Our dentist collects candy and pays the kids 1.00/pound. They have several staff members with family members serving overseas so they send off a big sweet care package every year. They rounded up so each kid got a couple of bucks and held out a couple to share with Alexandra who also donated most of her goodies.

Leah got quite a lot of attention with the Pippi costume she made mostly herself. Some called her Wendy, some called her Raggedy Anne but I just called her Cute!