Successful Trunk or Treat

 Last night was our ward's trunk or treat!  The kids all had a great time.  Weston was a mad scientist.  Brian went as Harry Potter.  Aaron was a Power Ranger.  Amber was a peacock.  Evan was a vampire.  And Katelynn was an angel.  :)  Once we got home, the kids had a fun time checking out the loot before bed time!  :)

 Although this picture is almost exactly the same as the last one, I had to include it just for Amber's facial expression!!  She is certainly an expressive little girl!!  :)  This face of her's just made me laugh out loud!

And with a busy day all the way around of visiting teaching, picking up and taking kids to school, and a trunk or treat, this little sweetheart was fast asleep when we got home!!  :)  It was a successful day!!

Evan Loves Art!

 Lately Evan has really been enjoying any kind of art thing.  We have this big book of pictures that I am not even sure where we got, but all the kids love to color in it.  Amber and Evan especially love it.  And when Amber is at school, Evan can sit for an hour and work on coloring pictures in it.  :)  This was a few days ago.  As soon as the kids were off to school he sat down to work at this picture.

 After I had fed Katelynn and gotten her to sleep, and then written some emails that needed to go out to the members of my Odyssey of the Mind team, I came over to find him busily coloring away!  :)  When he gets to concentrating on what he is doing, Evan makes some pretty funny faces.  I tried to get a few pictures of them, but he was so low to the paper and working so hard on what he was doing.

 If you make this one big, you can see his mouth open and his tongue out!  :)  After he finished these, he decided that our house didn't have much in the way of Halloween decorations.  So all this week during any spare moment that he and the other kids have, they have been making pumpkins and skeletons, and other such things and hanging them on the walls!  I love it!  I will post some of those later!

And here is his finished picture.  I love that he drew another sunshine right above the roof of the house!  :)  (Although you have to make the picture big in order to see that.)  I am not sure why he scribbled on the path because he colored it really well at first.  Oh well.  Perhaps he didn't like the color that he had done it with.  All in all I think that he really did a good job on it considering that he is just barely 4!!  (and a boy!)  I was impressed that he was able to do so well staying inside the lines on the picture!  :)  I am glad that we have found another thing that he really loves doing.  I am always thankful for the time that I get to spend with my little Evvy!!!

Just thought you would like to know....

That it is snowing at our house right now!! It's not cold enough to stick, but still...it's not even Halloween yet!

Cool Fall Afternoon

The cold weather is upon us here!  We had a few nice days last week in between all the rain we got, so when we had a nice day, we took advantage of it and played outside while we could.  The cold, cold days will be here soon, so we have to get out and enjoy fall while we can.  We had a nice day on Sunday, so we spent a little bit of time outside in the nice weather.  Brian was throwing leaves at me here!

Brian does love his cool sunglasses.  And I love how Weston is smiling in the background of this one too!

Amber had a good time outside too.

Our tomato plants are still producing tomatoes.  It is supposed to be in the 20's tonight though, so these are at the end of their life time!!  :)  Evan loves to check the garden.  I loved this picture of him!

My favorite bushes are turning colors.  The burning bushes are certainly burning over here!!  Today we had sleet in the afternoon.  It was just above freezing though (about 36 degrees) so thankfully nothing stuck.  It was also mixed in with rain!  We have had lots of rain lately!

Aaron wanted to get the rake out to rake up a big pile.  He had a lot of fun with the rake!  Too bad our other ones are broken!!  It looks like I need to get some more.

Since the other rakes were broken, Amber and Evan decided to use a broom to sweep up the leaves.  :)  It was so cute to see them sweep the grass.

And lastly, my Weston!  He may be a teen, but he still loves to play with the rest of the kids!!  :)  It was a nice afternoon!!

Looking so pretty

Little Miss KatieLynn looked so pretty in her fluffy dress yesterday that I just needed some cute pictures of her to share!!  :)  All she wanted to do was lean forward and try to get the camera!!

I love her sweet smiles and cute laugh!

"Please can I have that camera Momma?" says Katelynn!!

So, so happy!!  She is such a good and happy baby!  I am lucky to have such a good baby as my last one!

She looked pretty cute today in her Valentine-ish outfit that I got a few weeks ago at the GAP clearance center.  Since Katelynn was born in the Spring, most of the little clothes that I had for Amber are the wrong season for Katelynn.  It is getting cold here so I am needing long sleeved things.  The things that are sized 12 months (which is what Katelynn is wearing now) are all short sleeved from Amber since she wore that size in late Spring/ and Summer time.  When I found this for less than $5, it was just too cute to pass up!

Evan wanted in on the fun with his sister!  :)

She loves to smile and laugh with Evan, which in turn just makes him laugh and laugh too!!

Oh Katelynn!!  I just love those eyebrows that she has and how she makes such funny faces!!  I can't believe how big these two are getting!  It looks as though I am going to have to get my gates out and put them up soon!  I can't believe it!  Katelynn can roll all the way across the living room in about 10 seconds!!  She rolls like a champ and is really trying hard to crawl.  She does that inchworm crawl like crazy!!  I was looking over my blog from when Evan was her age and he wasn't even rolling over yet, let alone trying to crawl!  She is well on her way to being mobile!!  Slow down baby!  You are getting too big too fast!!  :)

Fall Break - part 3

Another place we went while we were camping was a place called Conkle's Hollow.  This was a few miles away by car, but so, so pretty!  This place was not as busy as other places.  And, most of the trail was paved which made for easy hiking.  The kids found this cool rock and wanted to climb up for a picture!

I actually think that this may have been one of my favorite places to hike.  The area was untouched it seemed, and so pretty!

This wall of rock was especially pretty, I thought, with all the moss and vegetation growing on it!  It was so quiet and peaceful here.

We finally made it through the gorge and to the tiny waterfall area that was at the end of the hike!  Brian decided to beat his chest like Tarzan.  (Not that he knows who Tarzan is!)  He was too funny, so I had to take a picture!

Then Evan and Amber had to do the same thing.  They were posing for Daddy with the camera.  I had to include this because Evan and Amber are almost the exact same height!!!  I bet within the next 6 months, Evan will pass Amber up in height!

The end of the gorge and the waterfall.

All the kids standing behind the waterfall!

We saw some cool looking millipedes along the hike.  We really didn't see much of any wildlife at this place, but these bugs were cool!

Standing by the waterfall and looking back towards where we had just come from.

The kids all enjoyed the hike!

After that, we headed over to some cliffs (that I can't remember the name of) to hike around some more.  It was so beautiful there as well.  We hiked around the cliff rim for a bit and then headed down into the gorge for a closer look at what that had to offer.

The cliffs were incredibly tall!  There were signs everywhere to watch your children closely.  I was thankful that my kids are so obedient and mind so well.  I don't think that I would have been as willing to hike here if I had not known that they would behave and stay close!

This was at the bottom of the gorge looking out to another trail.  We didn't hike that trail because it was getting to be lunch time, but I think we will have to go back sometime to check it out!

We hiked through this narrow pass.  It was called something like fat man's squeeze!  I just barely made it through with Katelynn in the pack!  :)

Here we were at toward the end of the hike.  The kids were tired by this point, but had hiked and climbed quite a bit!  They are good hikers and troopers for sure!

Later on we went for a drive to another state park that was about 10 miles up the road.  It was a lake of some sort.  It was not very wide, but it was long.  We stopped and got out to look at the water.  Katelynn was asleep in the car!

With the changing colors, it was so lovely here!!  Everywhere you looked, it seemed like you were in a postcard!

Since Katelynn was asleep, we let the kids get the poles out of the car and fish for a few minutes.  No one caught anything, but they did have fun!

Amber and Evan were glad to have their own poles and not have to share.

This day was our warmest day that we were there.  It was about 70 or so.  We did have a little bit of rain on this day (hence the reason that we went for a drive) but it was still fun!

Isn't it so lovely?!?

Then we headed back to camp.  Lots of people had cleared out by this time.  Amber rode her scooter up and down the street.  It was her favorite activity of the camp out she said!  :)

Here is a picture of our site.  We had some trees, but none that worked for hammocks because of the growth under them.  It was a nice and big site though.  For our one site, there were 4 sites across the street from us.  The one big drawback was the vicinity to the restrooms.  There was one that we thought was close, but it was just a pit toilet!  YUCK!!  We had to walk a bit further to get to the nice restrooms that had showers too.  They looked as though they had been recently redone and were actually some of the nicer camping bathrooms that I have been in!  :)

More of Amber on her scooter.  We were also right by this big water tower.  We didn't know that when we booked the site, but it was fine.  Just big.

Evan and his log again!!  :)  We had camp fires every morning and evening.

Brian was carving his walking stick that he found on a hike.  He had fun doing that.  These are all the pictures from my camera of our trip.  There are a few more that I will add from the camera.  We had such a great time on our trip that the kids didn't want to come home!!  :)  That is always a sign of a successful camping trip in my opinion!!!