october in pictures

in no particular order...

diane is our little builder. she is constantly carrying around duplo creations. she went through a pyramid phase at the beginning of the month, but other favorites include giraffes, airplanes, temples, and other buildings.

these are halloween pictures (like i said, no particular order). i had meant to do a separate halloween post, but here it is mid-november and it doesn't look like that's happening.

we had our ward trunk-or-treat the weekend before halloween. lots of fun games for the kids.

and lots of candy. seeing as my children don't really understand that candy is an important part of halloween (i think they've had about ten pieces since halloween, and not because i've hidden it or anything like that), randy and i did a little sort after they went to bed and took out the good stuff (pretty much anything with chocolate).

 

all year, the girls come up to me randomly and say, "i want to be ______ for halloween." and all year, i say, "that sounds great!" my theory is, let them change their minds as much as they want and then if they land on something ridiculous right before halloween, i just claim that there's not enough time to make that costume. this is just a theory because so far they haven't really picked anything impossible. really, they've just been candy corns the last couple years. i was tempted to just pull those out again, but they both wanted to be izzy the pirate, from jake and the neverland pirates, and it was an easy enough costume to pull together, so i let them. i had started out by trying to match it pretty exactly, but the girls kept modifying theirs to what they wanted it to be, which i was thrilled about. i was also very relieved that they are still excited to wear matching costumes. 

argh.

let's just claim that the hole in the knee was an intentional part of the costume, right?

more posing.

hey, it may have been 5:00 on halloween, but we did carve pumpkins. once again, they wanted to be matching.

gotta love trick-or-treating in the northwest, where you dress up and then cover it all up with coats and sweaters. they only went around the neighborhood on halloween (my girls also don't know that trick-or-treating can go on outside of your immediate neighborhood).

this is a video of the girls singing "three little pumpkins." it's a song that we had to sing at every house when we were growing up. i think my dad was hoping that it would deter us from trick-or-treating. it did mean that we got more candy because everyone thought we were adorable. randy wouldn't make the girls do it (even though they only went to four houses), but i wouldn't let them in the house until they gave me a stirring rendition.

the kids tackling randy after dinner one night. randy's family calls this dessert.

this boy loves to talk. never says anything coherent, but he can converse for hours.

love this smile.

hanging out in the morning.

jonathan decided to walk around in diane's shoes one day. he doesn't usually run around in a diaper, but it was too hilarious that i had to let him walk around like this for a while.

randy turned thirty this month. madeleine made him a card and put it on his nightstand. that girl loves to celebrate.

diane wanted a picture of her and jonathan as twins.

we had a lot of fog in the mornings this month and that, combined with all of the spider webs made for some beautiful artwork by mother nature as i walked madeleine to school every morning. i was a little obsessed with all of the webs. the pictures don't do them justice.

the fall colors were also brilliant this year. i love where we live.

this boy is my little buddy and loves to follow me around the house.

madeleine wanted a picture of her with her leaves.

in fantastic news, our landlord replaced the carpet in our two downstairs rooms. before, underneath, and after. the girls are now downstairs and the toy room is actually used much more often now.

diane builds with the duplos, and so does madeleine, but madeleine went through a phase this month where she was doing artwork with the legos (people, animals, clouds, rainbows, you name it).

jonathan got hand, foot, and mouth disease this month. it was pretty awful. i had never really heard of this until jonathan got it, yet when i mentioned it to some other moms, they said, "oh man, that's awful." i feel like it's the worst best kept secret because it's this gross contagious disease that nobody wants to talk about. jonathan's could have been much worse, but he basically didn't sleep for four nights and was super clingy and miserable.

another one of diane's strange nap positions.

cheese!

family cheese!