Happy Halloween!

Robert stuck his hand in the jack-o-lantern's mouth and got bit apparently.

Clara wasn't allowed to wear a costume to school (so lame), so I got her some cute knee-highs and let her wear my spider headband to help her get into the Halloween spirit. She's being a scary ghost here.

And here she is in the spider hat she made at school today while pretending to be a spider.

It's taking forever to upload pictures, so I'll post trick or treating pics later.

Pumpkin Patch

After pumpkin carving, we headed up to church for our annual Pumpkin Patch. I went a little overboard with the hemming of Princess Leia's dress. Oops. Whoever sized this dress was an idiot. It says for ages 5-7 and it was about a foot too long for her.

Have you ever tried to wrangle an ewok? Those things are feisty.

But oh so cuddly and cute! I'm dying of cuteness over here.

I was telling Chris, "Hurry, hurry, hurry. Take a picture. His hood is on!" It didn't stay on more than a few minutes all evening.

This year, they added a petting zoo, pony rides and hayride to the lineup. We didn't do the hayride or pony rides, but they checked out the animals for a few minutes.

Pumpkin Carving

We invited Jason down for our Halloween festivities this year. He got here yesterday afternoon, just in time to help carve our jack-o-lanterns. I had Clara draw a jack-o-lantern face for one of the pumpkins, but once she finished drawing it, she decided she didn't like it, so she chose a skeleton face (of all things) for her pumpkin. I happened to like her jack-o-lantern drawing very much though, so I set about carving it myself while she and JDog worked on the skeleton.

She wouldn't stick her hand in at first but we eventually talked her into it and she set about scraping the insides out.

Robert sat in for a few minutes but he wasn't much help. He kept sticking the seeds back in the pumpkin and didn't care much for the goopy mess.

Clara is into making scary vampire faces this year. Robert's working on his.

Haha! Love this one. If you haven't noticed, JDog is a really good sport. Here they are with the finished product.

And Clara and I with her first ever jack-o-lantern design.

"Pawpaw" and "Pawpaw" Visit

Dan and Linda came for a short visit this past weekend. They flew into Houston and then Chris drove them to Temple to meet a truck with all of their belongings and make sure it all got moved into their new house okay. They'll be retiring in a few months and moving to Temple. Yay! We'll have grandparents "close by". I see lots of babysitting in our near future :)

Robert made sure to kick the cuteness up a notch for Grandma and Grandpa. He quickly learned to say Grandpa (Pawpaw) and Grandma (also Pawpaw), which made Grandpa happy. (When Clara first learned to say their names, she called them Grandma and The Other Grandma.) Here's a picture of Robert's new look. He's not too sure about long sleeves and tends to squirm out of them.

Of course, Grandma and Grandpa came bearing gifts. Robert got a playmobil airplane and pilot (that never left his grip the whole weekend) while Clara got a cute paper doll set (that got played with by her and Grandma the whole weekend). On Sunday evening, I had the bright idea to go to a park. What I didn't know was that because of the drought, a year's worth of mosquito eggs have laid dormant until this week when the recent rains have caused them all to hatch. At the same time. A year's worth. Do you have any ideas how many mosquitoes that is? Apparently it's been on the news and everything.

So we got eaten up despite the bug spray. And then I accidentally pressed a button on Linda's camera and she couldn't figure out how to get it back to normal. Oops. And then Clara started complaining of a stomach ache, causing us to have a change of dinner plans. We decided to get Clara home and get her some medicine and we just brought Chinese home so the evening was kind of a bust.

I had to take Dan and Linda to the airport around noon on Monday so we decided to stop by and surprise Clara for lunch at school since her lunch is at 10:00. In the following pictures, Robert was trying to feed Grandma's necklace to her and I couldn't get Clara to smile without her mouth open and full of food.

So now Grandma and Grandpa are back home counting down the hours until their next visit. Thankfully it won't be another six months between visits.

Pumpkin Patch

It was a beautiful morning at the pumpkin patch today. Should've worn shorts though because it got a little warm.

The price of entrance more than doubled this year, but the price included a hayride this year and Robert got in free. I thought Robert would love the hayride with it being pulled by a tractor and all, but he was pretty wiggly and trying to get out the whole time. Clara decided she loved the employee that was on the hayride talking about all the different animals. Every time I looked over at her she was practically in the girl's lap.

Then Robert found the trough of corn and was in corn heaven. We were followed to the pumpkin patch again this year by Micah and Lisa. They got there as Clara and Robert were playing in the corn so we talked for quite some time since Robert was relatively contained between two troughs. We bumped into them two years ago at this same pumpkin patch.

And of course Robert didn't want to be pulled away from the corn and cars.

At some point, he did eventually take notice of the pumpkins. He especially liked the winner of the Tallest Pumpkin in the Patch. It was indeed cool, but not $25 cool.

Well, we've been to the pumpkin patch, so it's officially fall now. Let the fun begin.

Like Brother Like Sister

Just Some Park Pics

I'm trying to remember to take pictures when we're out so I have something to blog about. I'm not sure why, but I have a hard time writing post after post with no pictures to attach. We went to a park yesterday that we've been to several times before that's way off the beaten path. It's always vacant and there's a huge parking lot so I brought Clara's bike so she could practice. She's been hesitant to ride for quite some time and with the intense heat this summer, we didn't really push her. She didn't want to ride yesterday but being the terrible mother I am, I made her try. Usually she warms up to it after a minute or two. Nope. Wanted nothing to do with it. Just riding slowly and in a straight line she was almost in tears. I guess having a child who can't ride a bike isn't the end of the world. Any suggestions?

I really like this park because the play equipment is really unique. It's like an obstacle course and is completely covered. The only problem is there's not a playground for toddlers, just swings.

And there's trails and a couple of small lakes. There's a short trail to the creek with a beach area too but we haven't gone down to it yet. I want to take Chris with us and spend some time there.

Robert learned a new word while at the park. "Stick."

Lunch Date

I finally got myself up to Clara's school to have lunch with her today for the first time. She's been asking me to come up for awhile now. It's not that I haven't wanted to have lunch with her, but kindergarten eats at 10:00, so I'm typically not thinking about lunch around 9:30 or so when I would need to be getting ready to go up there.

So I went and got me a breakfast sandwich at Panera Bread and a pumpkin shaped cookie to surprise Clara with and we headed up to the school. If you go up to eat with your child, you have to sit at a special table. I kinda wanted to get to know her classmates and put names to faces. Is that how it works at other schools? I'm assuming the reasoning behind it is you're not allowed to have any contact with kids if you haven't had a background check. I'm not sure why kids would want to eat with their parents if it means they can't talk to their friends.

The whole time I was there, I kept hearing, "Clara! Clara! Clara!". So she spent the entire meal turned around trying to yell to her friends. She loved having lunch with us and Robert enjoyed himself immensely as well. I couldn't get him to even look at me for a picture; there was waaay to much to take in.

I thought this bulletin board was pretty neat. It's self-portraits of all of the students. Clara's been talking about the colors in the rainbow a lot lately, so I guess the whole school's been learning the same thing.

Too Quiet

Sometimes when Robert is being too quiet it's because he's creating art on the floor with markers (which then requires mandatory clean up by the perpetrator).

And other times the masterpiece appears on the wall in another of his favorite mediums, crayon.

But occasionally the little tyke surprises me. Quiet doesn't always mean there's a mess to clean up. Sometimes quiet is good. Sometimes quiet makes me smile.

More and More

Robert has continued to add several words a day to his vocabulary. Yesterday I went to the mall and when I got him out of the car and he saw the stroller, he said "walk" for the first time. Then tonight he started doing the wheels on the bus hand movements and said, "wheels bus". He's also started saying car (instead of just making the noise), more, ball, book and backpack (pack pack) when talking about his backpack or my purse.

He won't usually try to form words correctly when you ask him to though. For instance, if you ask him to say watermelon, he says "da da da da"; table is "da da". He always uses the sound "da" and just gets the number of syllables right.

Oh, and I forgot to mention his newest thing. I have to try really hard to keep a straight face when he starts doing it. He's started telling people off. When someone takes his toy, sits in his spot or commits some other terrible injustice, he gets an angry look on his face, points at the perpetrator and starts punching in their general direction while angrily spouting gibberish like "DA BAJOE, PAKOE BAAAAA!!" You don't want to see him when he's angry.