The Rest of October

We had a few mornings with no fog to speak of, so I was glad to wake to it surrounding the house in full force this morning. (Before I saw the fog, I woke to the occasional sound of a shotgun firing in the distance. I suppose guns firing in the city might mean something more alarming, but here it meant only what Mike mumbled as he rolled over in bed--still mostly asleep: "first day of the pheasant hunt". When I got out of bed earlier and saw all the thick fog I wondered how successful the pheasant hunters would find their hunt today! A little blessing for the pheasants I suppose. Oh! And that just reminded me of this funny little post I wrote over a decade ago!)

Anders came home from school like this one day. Playing four-square with a basketball. Sigh. It was for the best perhaps. He hadn't mentioned any trouble seeing, but it turns out his vision had grown much much worse since his last eye exam. Getting new glasses was like seeing the world totally fresh again. I'm a little sad for the boy to have such poor eyesight though. I'm a +1.5 and can't see well without glasses or contacts at all. He is now a +4.5! :(

Sometimes Star just asks me to come snuggle. 

A full moon.

Daisy curling the girls' hair for cousin Grace's reception.

We've been without a piano since our move! And we really can't fit one in the rental. But when Daisy came up last weekend we had her pick up a keyboard Mike had seen on ksl on her way! Just in time for Christmas music!

Daisy caught this picture of Starling watching, from the girls' room window, our first official snowflakes fall. (We won't count it as the first actual snowfall since those flakes you see were about all it was.)

And a few photos of little Cherub.

This four-year-old person will not speak to other adults. She generally won't even acknowledge anything they say. What's to be done with such a person? I sometimes marvel at how she will just quietly wait and not utter a single protest if I am talking to someone for a length of time at the grocery store or while she sits in the jog stroller. (When her siblings would have long been interrupting and moaning, "mommmmmm! mommmm!") And if I have to take her along to an appointment at a doctor's office or to the school or some such, she just sits quietly on my lap the entire time. No wiggling and running about. And yet at home she runs and yells and makes demands and chatters away. She refuses to wear anything but what she chooses or to let me do her hair. And she seems to feel that any friends of her young siblings should rightly be her best friend. Such a little person.

And of course, we can't post "the rest of October" without these pictures! Here the kids were before leaving for school on Halloween:

Mette's black hairspray stained the shoulder of her white shirt completely black by the end of the school day. And her hair itself faded enough that she said it just looked like gray hair (an old Jasmine?) so she showered (we had to wash her hair about five times) before the the evening's celebrations.

Summer (Merida from Brave) didn't have such trouble with her orange spray fading or getting on things, BUT the can quit working and would not spray when I'd only done half of her hair! With the school bus coming we had no choice but to pull part of the non orange side back a bit in hopes it would blend and shrug over her half orange hair. She was a good sport about it. 

Here they are with the bus-stop crew:

And little Hansie: always the last to board what with all his demands for one last hug and one last goodbye and so on.

Penny went to school wearing a yellow shirt with a "Hello, my name is Life" sticker on it. She carried a basket of lemons with her. And Jesse wore the tried and true Charlie Brown shirt. Sadly I didn't get a photo of them. And nothing from Daisy or my little missionary. But Abe sent a photo of how he went about campus--just as he did last year. (When I asked how it went getting the paint back off he replied, "I took a shower and looked in the mirror and promptly took another shower.")

Here some girls are all ready to trick-or-treat, only ... where would they possibly go? I certainly don't see any houses!

It was a little strange not having our same tradition for Halloween night just laid out for us! Usually the older girls walk the younger kids around to the neighbor's in our cul-de-sac, and then Mike takes them around the block while I stay to hand out candy. Then the younger, more-tired-out ones get dropped back off to me while Mike takes the rest to his mom's and then to various houses in the ward.

But out here we weren't even sure that any houses in our ward would be prepared with candy to pass out (since trick-or-treaters don't usally opt to trick-or-treat along lonesome country roads). We went to the mutli-ward trunk-or-treat ... just late enough to see the last car leave. Then we drove up to a little neighborhood of closely packed houses. It reminded me a lot of our Halloweens up in our WA neighborhood but I missed seeing familiar faces at the doors. The kids had fun though and Penny and Jesse trailed along with us to watch their siblings (and to run, unabashedly, up to the houses with bowls of candy left for people to take one from). And when that was all done, several of us stopped by the party our neighbor's were holding in their garage. I'm excited to figure out more fully what our new traditions here will be as the years go on (and I'm glad we've still got quite a few years of young trick-or-treaters to help us establish them!)

I was surprised when Starling decided, last minute, on the wolf instead of her pink princess dress! (That wolf costume, first worn by Abe, has served us well for two decades now!)

(As you can see, poor Anders had to wear his glasses like this for several days while we waited for his new ones to arrive!)

(It did seem a little sad to have nobody at all see our jack-o-lantern lit porch! But I guess the coziness was mostly really for us!)

And now I should probably start considering Christmas for all these kids of mine!