Happy Halloween

Hurray for a good Halloween. We only had one costume event this year, which seemed to be enough for us. Henry wore the dog costume that I made for Gavin for his first Halloween (also sometimes called a cow costume). He looked fabulous. He is wild and crazy as always and had fun crawling all over the church getting into mischief and trying to get people to give him candy before Mom and Dad noticed.

Gavin was a fireman, this costume was previewed earlier in the month because of the excitement of getting to wear it. It looked great for its big night. He had a few people ask him where the fire was, and he would just smile as though they must be making a joke. I guess the fact that firemen go to fight fires was not what he had in mind when he picked this costume. The necklace he is wearing has ghosts that light up, the neighbors that share our duplex with us got it for him to use in the dark.
And off we go.
Just a little funny shot of wrestle mania as we tried to take a group picture.

Leaves and Laughs

Saturday afternoon we spent some time outside enjoying the really nice weather. We went on a walk to Liberty Park to play and to check out the changing leaves. Gavin loved it, we got to go the playground where we don't go very often and he kept saying, "Dad, this is the best playground I ever seen." or "Wow, this is the best slide I ever seen." Lately he has been busting out all new phrases that just make us laugh. Henry is also a big boy with the new tray attached to the stroller, so he is super happy to go walking where ever we want to go. We also decided that is would be fun to take some fall leaf pictures. Hopefully this was not a preview of how our family pictures will go in a month. We couldn't get both of them to look at the same time and could hardly get them to be at all still for even as second, they were so excited to be surrounded by the leaves. I included a few of the not so perfect shots so you can really get a feel for the pandemonium that we have lately.

We also painted Halloween pumpkins this week to get ready for Wednesday. Nothing like hanging out in your underwear.

This pumpkin idea looked a lot cute in the magazine, oh well, typical for my craft pursuits.

Henry wasn't really interested in painting, but loves to be tickled by Dad.

This shot is from a few weeks back, but I love it. What a cute kid I have!

Thank you for difficult times

So lately Gavin has gotten really good at saying prayer, and even when he says that he doesn't want to be the one to say the prayer, he usually repeats after whoever is saying it. There have been some stressful times for our extended family lately and today was another one of those days. While Gavin and I were saying prayers together tonight, he was repeating everything that I said, but with his own interpretation. Like I say, "Bless Gavin to continue to grow healthy and strong." and he says, "Help me that I can be strong." I say, "Bless Henry that he will continue to grow and be healthy." He says, "Help Henry to be strong too."
So even though I was hearing him repeat things that I said, he caught me off guard when I said, "Please help and comfort us through these difficult times." and then Gavin said, "Thank you for the difficult times." I think sometimes it takes the smallest people in our lives to help us realize what we should really be thinking and saying. And hard times are the times when our blessings become the most evident and obvious to us.

Celebrity look a likes

So we had to copy the Bergers and do a celebrity look a like collage. Kind of funny that it thought Caleb looked so much like Linus Pauling. hehe. Though not so nice that all of the pictures that I match have squinty eyes. It certainly was a fun time to try it though.

Fall Fun

Just a few fun shots of our last few weeks, which seem to have flown by. Fall really seems to go too fast for us. Henry is now crawling all over and seems to be getting too old. Gavin is staying busy trying to keep toys from his brother and keep up with Mom and Dad's crazy schedule.

Last Friday we took the afternoon to go to the zoo. We rode the zoo train for the first time and then played on the playground, after seeing the animals of course.

Here is Gavin in his fort, he could play in here forever.

Gavin also loves to hold Henry, though it is hard to say if Henry loves it as much.

This is what the boys were doing to Dad while we were watching conference. You can see that he puts up with a lot.

Here is Caleb hanging drywall... things in the backroom will some day be finished.