As 2011 comes to a close

 So many fun things to report. Where does one begin when one is so behind? I have such a terrible memory, but I will attempt to encapsulate our past few months.

October

First campout with the Hill Country Camping Society. We stayed close to home and camped out at Pace Bend. So much fun to get out of the normal routine and run around in the fresh air!

I am so thankful for all my dear friends who let me steal their little ones away so I can soak up as much baby snuggle time as I can possibly handle.

Halloween

Emmy picked out our characters and I thought she did quite a good job. She and Boone made an excellent Kanga and Tigger. Joel and I were of course Pooh and Tigger. I made all of our costumes and poor Joel got the raw end of the deal. He basically was wearing a large yellow dress all night. But he was good sport!!

November

The weather was incredible! We finally got out of the heat wave and entered into this beautiful season. This meant lots of time playing outside and having picnics on the driveway.

And lots of mudpies in the backyard!

 We worked on some projects. Kyle and Luke's sweet mom gave me this beautiful desk and here are my little elves hard at work putting a coat of paint on. I need to take a picture of the finished product! It turned out so cute. Thank you Franny!

 My little Elton John. This month was full of impromptu concerts also!

 Mel had sweet baby Blair. More pics to come!

For some reason I bought an extremely large quantity of carrots at Costco, so we set out to make as many carrot recipes as I could find on allrecipes.com. Emmy and Boone wanted to help so badly. Who knew that skinning carrots was so much fun?

Oh wait, where did my helpers go?

This is how our days usually go: get out lots of materials for a special activity and figure out how to make it fun for all, do said activity for 5 minutes, move on to next activity while I try not to bash my head against a wall and clean up first activity. Before I knew it, the carrot spell had worn off and the kiddos were off to bigger and better things, aka- making more messes to clean up.

We went camping again this month but I unfortunately did not get any pictures. We camped out with two other families (Luke and the Murrays) and Trey came for a few hours and taught us how to make funnel cakes! We also fried up some steaks and venison- I am pretty sure we all packed on an extra pound or five that weekend. So good!
Emmy also made it past a pretty big milestone this month: she is completely out of diapers!! She had 14 straight nights with no accidents and as a reward went ice skating with Joel. Again, I am terrible at making sure photos are taken, but just imagine a really excited three year old wearing super cute ice skates. Boone felt a little left out so he and I went out on a special date to Target. Really. We just walked around Target. He loved it. This age is so great in some ways!

Thanksgiving

 We went on a little hike that morning and began what I hope will become a yearly tradition! We explored the trails in the park near our house and it was so much fun! Of course I did get a bad case of poison ivy, but that's another story.

My dad had to stay in Houston as his dad was in the hospital, but Aunt Lesley was able to come up and join us for Thanksgiving dinner. She came bearing fun gifts from her trip to Dubai (Oh my!) and helped us put up the Christmas tree.We had a lovely meal and a great visit!

 Joel made pulled pork and it was amazing!

And finally, here is a sampling of how we keep the kids entertained in the car. They make me smile!