Classic

Oh boy...These are some classic photos to be sure!  

When Aunt Rachel came to visit she brought some produce from her garden.  She brought some cucumbers and green peppers that sat on my counter for a few days.  One day, Isaac saw them and decided he wanted a whole pepper and a whole cucumber for a snack.  Um...okay.  Can't argue that one.  Of course Ben had to follow suit, as he does with everything.  The looked so funny with cucumber in one hand, green pepper in the other.  They ate them up too.  And then wanted the same thing the next afternoon too.

One of the days that Jacob's mom was here we took the kids roller skating.  Sarah knows so many of the deals in town.  She's good like that!  On Wednesdays they have a deal for kids and parents, I can't remember if the kids are free or the adults, but it made the whole thing really affordable and my kids LOVED it.  I'm sure we'll be back again many times this winter.

Ben was really capable on these playschool roller blades.

Isaac ended up switching from the high friction skates to the playschool roller blades.  Even the high friction skates were pretty easy to roll and there was a lot of falling.  These roller blades are more like walking.

Sarah's kids had been before and were really good at keeping their balance in the skates.  I love this picture of Isaac holding Riley's hand, even if it was staged.

We were trying to capture a shot of all the kids holding hands.  It was a joke.  This is the best I got.  Obviously lighting in a roller rink is terrible.  And Isaac isn't a fan of staying still for pictures.

Part way through the two hour skating session they pull out these little wiggle type cars.  Everyone loved these!  Including me.

Maxwell and Isaac chased each other around on these for a long time, laughing the whole time!

Ben wanted to try the skates.  I think he looks adorable in them.  He loved being pulled in while wearing them.

There were many falls, of course, but everyone had a really good time.  Being in a dank skating rink brought back a lot of memories.  I remembered the 4th grade field trip and skating the "couples" skate with Jimmy Doyle.  Man were my hands sweaty, I was so nervous.  I was also so embarrassed every time my skate would hit into his.  And I was really embarrassed on the bus ride home when Diana asked if I skated with anyone while Jimmy was right there!  I sure had a little elementary crush on him.  Then I thought of the times we would go to the Friday night skate in high school.  I think I forced my friends to go a couple times hoping to "run into" the boy I liked only to be disappointed when he didn't show up.  Silly.  But such fun memories!

Anyway...I love October!  and I love kicking it off with General Conference.

I thought it was so cute that Ben pulled his chair right up to the TV to get a good look at President Packer.

I had a lot of activities for the kids to do during conference, nothing terribly exciting or clever, just some of the pre-school supplies they don't regularly get to play with.  It worked out pretty well.  I feel like I got a lot more out of these sessions than I did 6 months ago, so that's good!  We also rotated through our 72 hour kits and checked all the smoke detectors.  Jacob had the boys practice what we would do in case of a fire.  That was awesome.  They loved the little fire drill and had to repeat it several times that day.

I finished the quilt I've been working on for my mother.  They came to visit the Monday after conference and I was so glad to have it done in time.  I think it turned out well and I had a lot of fun quilting it.  I tried out some new things.  I think I could be good at machine quilting given some more practice.  This quilt was surely a stretch of my abilities as a quilter and I feel much more confident now.  I'm excited to keep trying some new techniques in our Relief Society block of the month group.   I'll take some pictures of what we've done so far in that group and post them some time.

I took close up pictures of each block but this one was my favorite to quilt.  I did a flower in the center and some leafy, flower sort of things in the cream triangles...not sure what they are called, if they are called anything.  It was fun!

And I was totally negligent when my parents were here and only pulled out the camera one day.  This was a typical scene though.  My dad built train tracks for Isaac and Ben and my mom and I sewed a lot of costumes for Halloween.  She was making something for MaryAnn that I helped her with and she helped me with a good chunk of our families costumes.  We are dressing up as Star Wars characters this year.  I'll be excited to show you the pictures when we are all decked out.  Isaac is going to be R2D2, Ben is yoda (his hat is adorable!), I'm Leia (probably the least cool costume of the bunch, but still decent) and Jacob is going to be Han Solo.  The costumes came together mostly as cute as they were in my head.  That's always nice.  I usually have it the opposite, cute in theory, horrible in actuality.

Dad also entertained the kids with his remote control helicopter which the boys (especially Isaac) loved, we went to the park, saw the temple construction, shopped some, and went out to dinner.  All in all it was a fun visit with my folks.  Thanks for coming!