Fall Roundup 2021

 Busy, busy, busy! That's what we've been.

Joseph finished up another season of soccer.  The season started pretty rocky. Despite lots of practice, they lost every game. But eventually, all the work started paying off and Pow! They won the last three games. 

One day, a family on the opposing team brought their pet parakeet and let all the kids play with him. It was so cute!

 

Ada has been working hard with her Applause singing group. They did their first show in front of the DPAC studio singing "It's a hard knock life" from Annie.

Joseph celebrated his 8th birthday in September. He had a party with lots of friends over. Ingeniously, we opened presents first this time instead of at the end of the party, and it was great! The boys spent the whole rest of the party playing with all the cool presents he got (including LOTS of nerf guns). It was the best party ever!

He insisted on a cookie monster cake, mostly, I think, to eat the cookies himself.

Well.... the day after Joe's party, I started feeling awful. Yep! I got COVID. Sarah and I both came down with it. We both had pretty mild symptoms (fever, fatigue, loss of taste and smell) and were just fine after a week or so. Matt came down with a pretty nasty rash, and Peter had one day of fever. Everyone else was just fine. Overall, we weathered it just fine, feeling ourselves very blessed! 

But, because of covid, we had to postpone Joe's baptism until October. Here is the picture we used on his invitations.

And here is the one he wanted to use.

When the day finally came, we got to the church early all ready to set up and change....and the church was locked. Our poor, overworked Bishop (who also happens to be our good friend and neighbor) totally forgot about it. But we finally tracked him down and got things rolling and it turned into a wonderful experience.

After the baptism, we had all the family over for dinner. It was threatening rain, but instead of rain we got the most beautiful rainbow I've ever seen. The picture really doesn't capture it at all. We had kind of rainbow theme going on with one of the songs at the baptism being "I like to look for rainbows..." and the primary message included a box of skittles and a rainbow-themed thought. When we saw the real thing out the window, we all ran outside to see it. I leaned over to Jojo and told him Heavenly Father was sending him a sign that He was really proud of him being baptized that day.

This fall we invested in a mosquito trap (and it really does help!) and a porch swing so we can actually enjoy our backyard in the cooler weather. (Yes, my northern friends, we have mosquitoes here well into fall and even into winter sometimes).

We took a field trip with our homeschool group to Dewberry Farms. There's not much "farm" to it, but it was a whole lot of fun.

Another day, we signed up for archery lessons at a county park. Even Mom got into it. 

Sarah's birthday!!! 

She finally turned the big 1-2. She wanted to do something different for her party this year, so we did a murder mystery party. All the guests were given a persona and some scripted questions/answers, and they were supposed to be able to figure out who "done it." It actually went really well and a few of the girls guessed correctly.

She wanted a butterfly bunt cake, and this is what I came up with: the most beautiful cake ever! 

Halloween Time!

The kids have so much fun getting ready for Halloween. They don't prepare just one costume, but MANY!  This year, we had extra fun learning how to do face paint.

Peter? ... Peter who?

We had a Halloween party for our homeschool group.

The best game was "Spin-the-Bottle Fear Factor." One of the things you had to do was eat cricket candy. You even got the pick which flavor --orange or cotton candy. Mmmmmm!

Decorating halloween cookies at Nana's house...

More costumes and fun...

Ada really wanted to do a "girl's day out" with some friends. So she saved up lots of "good job gumball points" and we took some friends out to lunch and headed over to the interactive zoo.