Pumpkins and Such

Our annual pumpkin adventure, searching for just the perfect set of orange, white and now gray gords!  We had lots of fun as usual at Uncle Jeff's and Aunt Janice's!

The perfect pumpkin chair.

Had to line all of the pumpkins up on the front porch just the way he wanted them.

Let the carving begin! 

Gavin: "Whoa! There's like 20,000 guts in there!!"

Gavin with his pumpkin... 

And with Grace's pumpkin, which we took this weekend to the cemetery.  Hopefully the battery-operated tea light is still shining bright.  I'll go back tomorrow to double check it.

The finished products proudly displayed and lit.

And a trip to the apple farm and corn maze, though no "you pick" this year due to the late frost.  Still enjoyed some beautiful sunny and warm fall weather, a donut and some apple cider.

Fall Family Photos

We headed to a local park to have some family photos taken by my friend, Heather of Heather Abram Photography.  Check her out on Facebook!  I highly recommend her, given she has FOUR boys and is used to the toddler craziness that goes hand in hand with getting that perfect shot.  She captured some really fun photos for us!  Here's a sampling of some of my favorite posed and candid shots (including funny faces).  Apologies if you also see one of these re-appear on our Christmas card this year, perhaps with a little discreet remembrance of our angel :)

 

Art work

I've been a bad blogger lately, I know.  And even tonight I'm going to take the easy way out and let the photos do most of the talking.  All has been well in our household.  We're nicely adjusting to the preschool schedule.  Gavin has been a pretty good riser in the early mornings and just loves to go to school.  Runs from Brad when he's dropped off, joins the other kids, and never looks back.  He often asks if he gets to go to school on his days off. 

And he is learning fun things - new songs, stories, phonics, general getting-alongness.  This morning while getting his shoes on before church, he spontaneously began to say the Pledge of Allegiance.  Had no idea he learned that.  He knows all of the words and even pronounces them all correctly, including "indivisible".  I do like that he attends a school where they can actually recite this very importan pledge. 

Brad usually gets the honor of dropping him off and picking him up from school, but I did go a couple of weeks ago to pick him up.  I got there about 10 minutes early and was able to secretly watch him and the other kids through the window of the classroom door finish up the "bear hunt" song and all of the leg and arm motions that go along with it.  It was fun to watch him learning from his teacher, standing in one spot and participating with a smile on his face. 

His teacher shared with us a couple of weeks into school that Gavin was pushing kids (I imagine it is an elbowing to get to the toys he wants to keep others from or to get to them when someone else is playing with them).  We've been talking with him lots about the courtesies of sharing, being kind, loving, and respectful to others.  Just this week, his teacher told Brad that he has been doing very good.  No issues with pushing any more, phew!

And I've just loved getting all of the arts and crafts projects home each week.  Here's a sampling of the first month.  For all of you veteran parents out there, I'm interested in ideas for how you "keep" and display all of these masterpieces.  I was thinking that taking and keeping photos of each piece may work, knowing that at some point, our house will reach capacity for storing these beauties but that my external hard drive and blog can store lots and lots of these.  Any other creative ideas out there?  I'd love to do a display board, but even then you can only display so many at a time.  Hummm, let me know what your best ideas has been...