When October goes. . .

Ok. It's been a busy month. Here are a few of the things going on:


This year for Halloween, Bryce was dirty laundry (pretty scary eh?), Emily was Rapunzel from Rapunzel's Revenge (really, your girls will love this book), Sarah was a witch (Elphaba from our favorite musical, Wicked), Abby was a turtle, and Caleb was a stink bug. Yep, a stink bug. He picked it, not me.





Shon thinks I look like Sarah Palin. I think it's the glasses. That would have been a great Halloween costume.

Fall soccer is over. The kids had fun, but it's nice to not have so many practices to go to. Bryce is a great goalie. Abby spent a lot of time running around, waving to the croud. Her favorite part of soccer was giving the other team a high five. (I think four might be a little young for some kids to play soccer.) Sarah did really well this season. She is one quick kid.

October also brought our first frost, which means my garden is dead. It was an awesome garden year. Here's a picture of the tomatoes. They completely overgrew my white picket fence. We're still eating tomatoes that I picked green off the vine before the frost and set in the window. In addition to tomatoes, we also had peppers, pumpkins, watermelons, spaghetti squash, acorn squash, peas, carrots, onions, beans, corn, basil, cilantro, strawberries, cucumbers, purple potatoes, and yellow and red raspberries.

Here's Emily with a funny carrot.

Caleb is officially potty trained, which means for the first time in 11 years, no one in my family wears diapers. I wish I could take credit, but he's really the one who decided it was time. We were watching Bryce play basketball, the score was tied and there was a minute left and Caleb says "I need to go potty." I said "wait just a minute, ok?" to which he said "I need to go potty." I put him off again. Then I heard giggling behind me. I looked at Caleb. He had taken off his clothes. Ok! Let's go potty! He's got a lot of great role models to show him the way. It's nice. No bribes, no potty chair. Just a two year old saying "I do it self" every ten seconds. One tip I learned that I think really did help was that I started changing his diaper standing up. I don't know what that does, but it seemed to really help him take charge of things.

Here's Caleb on his first day of preschool. He LOVES his back pack. He even took a nap in it the first day. He's still my baby, so it's hard for me to see him growing up so fast. It's a good thing he's such a snuggle bug.