Halloween, etc.

Michael surprised me one morning by coming into the kitchen declaring "Mom look! I have chicken pox!"  . . . It's amazing how useful a red marker can be.  Thankfully, it was the washable kind.

The kids LOVE their new baby brother. Adelaide especially likes to play with his swing and rub his soft head. Sadie can't resist tickling his feet and trying to get him to grab baby toys. Michael loves to get right up in his face and talk to him in baby talk.  I've been feeling kind of guilty that I can't give Joseph as much attention as I would like (since I'm running around keeping tabs on my other kids), but then I realized he gets plenty of attention! It's just not all from me.

A week before Halloween, we celebrated Sadie's 4th birthday. She has been planning a princess party for the last year. (Reviewing and revising her plans pretty much every hour of every day for the last 10 months.)  We had several little princess-friends come over, ate a castle cake (I had sooo much fun making this!), played party games, and broke a pinata. We made the pinata ourselves doing several layers of paper mache over the course of a week.  And, it was actually easier than I thought it would be. Sadly, we broke it apart before I thought to get a picture of it, but it turned out really cute and surprisingly tough to break open --for four-year-old girls, anyway.

Halloween night, my dad came over to go trick-or-treating with us. (Mom stayed home to hand out candy.) Michael was a robot (if you couldn't guess), Sadie was a princess (big surprise, right?), Adelaide was a ladybug (she loved it), and Joseph was a little doggy (you can't see it very well, but he was wearing a little doggy hat).

These girls are soooo very different and yet both so girly in their own ways. They love dressing up together and are learning to be very sweet together . . . most of the time.

Seven layers of fluff!

I am so proud of this boy! Michael brought his first report card home a few weeks ago and got straight Es --E for excellent! (Except an "S" in PE, but whoever gets an E in PE anyway?!)

 

Several of his classmates have already lost teeth, so he was super-excited to discover one of his own teeth was loose.  

And here he is after he pulled it out just yesterday.