Halloween #1

Trick-or-treating was last night here in Jim Thorpe. This is our first of 4 times that we'll be dressing up this year, so here's this night's costumes...

Chloe is a ballerina, Gracie is a cat, and Julia is a frog.

On a side note, Chloe's been debating for weeks about her costume (ballerina?, fairy?, princess?), but had decided this weekend to be a princess. So, I had gotten all the costume stuff together ready while she was at school, but when I picked her up, she informed me... "Mom, I told Nolan (boy who sits near her at school) that I'm either going to be a princess or a ballerina and asked him what he thought I should be and he said a ballerina, so I'm going to be a ballerina" So, ballerina it was.

Julia got very frustrated because her hands were covered, which meant she couldn't dig through the drawer looking for remotes to push buttons on, or throw books all over the floor, or any of the other fun activities that occupy her time. She was much happier once we found her hands...

Then, she was ready to wander and play while we got everyone else ready.

And here are the girls, ready to go out trick-or-treating. It was pretty cold here, but thankfully the wind had died down by the evening, so it didn't feel as cold as it could have.

The girls came up with nicknames for their winter coats. Gracie is the "pink marshmellow coat", Julia's is the "lion coat", and Chloe's is a "pink cheetah". So, Chloe decided that tonight, Julia was REALLY dressed up as a frog who was eaten by a lion.

We went trick-or-treating for about 30 minutes and then came back to our house to pass out candy. We still had a LOT of people come by our house, but it was a little less than in the past 2 years. We gave out almost these entire 2 bowls of candy in about an hour.

Julia had a great time wandering the porch, digging through the candy bowls, and watching the people walk past.

The kids also got some VERY generous bags of goodies from several of our neighbors. We have some very nice neighbors around us, and the girls each got personalized bags of treats, candy, coloring books, popcorn, pencils etc from about 5 different people around us. So, even with only going out a short amount of time, we ended up with LOTS of Halloween candy & other assorted Halloweeny things. We very blessed to live in such a close-knit area with neighbors who care about our girls.

The many faces of Gracie

Gracie loves to make silly faces (while we all laugh at her). Her favorite is her angry face. She'll cross her arms and give us this look (especially Chloe) fairly often. She loves for us to tell her all the different emotions and then she'll show us her face. So, in the spirit of this being a scrapbook to remember our kids right now, here are Gracie's faces...

Shy Gracie

Angry Gracie

Excited Gracie

Scared Gracie

Happy Gracie (although she also looks a bit crazy in this one)

Sad Gracie

Gracie enjoying a yummy peanut butter & jelly sandwich

Sleepy Gracie

And here's my sweet Gracie

And then I thought I'd do a movie of a couple of Gracie's cute sayings. She loves to tell us "you funny" so I had to capture that.

"I love books", by Julia

Julia loves looking at books, and today I noticed she was sitting IN the book bin to look at one of her favorite books. So, of course, I HAD to pull out the camera!!

Timber & Balloon Festival

On Saturday, we went to a ski resort not too far from us. They were having a "Timber & Balloon Festival". We had a good time, in spite of it being too windy for them to actually launch the hot air balloons, but more on that later.

One of the main attractions was a lumberjack show. They had 4 lumberjacks who used all sorts of different saws (including a souped-up chainsaw) to cut up all different sizes of logs. They had a race to the top of a tree, an ax-throwing competition, and a carving contest. It was fun to watch, and we were far enough away that the girls weren't too scared of the noise!!


They had an old hot-air balloon blown up so that you could see the size of the balloons and touch and feel the material. You could also go into the balloon. It was really cool to see up-close.

We got to see a sky-diving exhibition, and it was pretty impressive how fast they came down, and yet how accurate they were...all 4 landed within 50 feet of the flag they were aiming for. The man with the rainbow parachute here in this picture is the world record holder for total number of dives, so every dive he makes, he sets a new world record.

The girls had fun going on a pony ride and riding on this barrel train, as well as playing on the HUGE playpark at the ski resort.

(On a side note, the girls got to pick what color barrel they were in, and guess what? Gracie picked yellow, and Chloe picked... pink, of course!!)

And here is the disappointment... They were supposed to do a hot air balloon launch at the end of the day, but it was too windy. They postponed it, hoping the wind would die down or change directions (so we waited another 30 minutes, hoping to see the balloons get set up and launch), but it was still too windy. We still had a great time, but were really sad to not get to see the hot air balloons get ready and take off from so close.

As we were leaving, we saw this beautiful man-made waterfall in amongst some amazing fall foliage.

On the way home, we stopped by a restaurant that gives out free cookies with the kid's meal. So, the girls were eating them on the way home, and at one point we looked back and Gracie was falling asleep while she was in the midst of licking the frosting off of the cookie. So cute!!

Their personalities shine through

We painted pumpkins today. The girls had a great time, and I enjoyed watching their personalities come out in their painting styles.

The first shots are Gracie's pumpkins & her paint plate. Notice that all the colors are mixed together and it turns out to be all one color. She likes to dip her paintbrush in every color, every time she gets more paint.

Now, for Exhibit B. Here are Chloe's pumpkins, paint plates, & paintbrushes (notice the plural on all of that). She likes to have her paint colors all separate, with separate paint brushes for each color. (Which is why we need 2 different paint sources. She definitely can't share paint with Gracie. They each have their own watercolors too, since Gracie's all end up being grayish black by the time she's done painting one picture...)

Izzy came through while we were doing post-painting hand-washing and walked over the table to smell everything. She stepped in paint with 2 different paws and ran around the kitchen before I caught her (thankfully I noticed and put up the gate so she didn't get onto the carpet). So, I had extra paws to wash, plus a few paint spots on the floor. Note to self, don't leave paint out on the table if the dog is around...

Pictures of the girls

I've been meaning to put these pictures up for a few weeks now, but have never remembered to. We had pictures taken for Julia's 1st birthday, and had pictures taken of all 3 girls at the same time. Here are the ones we got (& LOVE). We had to go 2 different times to get the pictures taken...the first day, Gracie got really freaked out, wouldn't smile, and started crying when we kept telling her to smile. So, we left, and came back the next day to try again. We were glad we did, because we ended up getting great pictures!!