Pictures and Thanksgiving

A friend of ours offered to take some pictures of our girls last week. Here are some of our favorite shots.

Alyssa did great and there were a lot of really cute pictures of her. Ashley is not much of a smiler on demand, so it was a little bit harder to find a good happy picture of her.

Here are some of the two girls together. It was a challenge to get the two of them to sit without having my friend's little boy want to sit in the shot with them. And whenever I would try to distract the little boy, Alyssa and Ashley would get distracted too.

We are doing well. We had a nice Thanksgiving. We invited three other families with smaller children over to share the day with us. We didn't take any pictures, but it was nice to have friends to help with the food and to keep us company as our family is so far from us.

Little Musician

We finally recorded Alyssa's recent accomplishments on the piano. Enjoy!

Brown paper packages tied up with strings...

On Thursday, We got two packages and two letters. The girls were so excited, especially since most of it was for them. They were excited about these new clothes that they got from Gawbie and Grandpa and had to put them on right away.

Shortly after the picture above was taken, the two girls stood up in that chair and tipped it over before I could stop them. Alyssa cried from fear and Ashley stood right up and continued playing (even though she was the one that ended up on the bottom of the pile when they fell - She has no fear). As soon as Alyssa calmed down, she wanted to take a few more pictures with her new clothes. Ashley had moved on. That puppy that she is holding is the prize possession in our house. It is Alyssa's, but Ashley constantly asks to play with it.

The other things that we got that day were the following: Alyssa got piano music from Grandma Bev, both girls got ice cream money from Great Grandma and Grandpa Ginos, and I got a new food processor(a gift that Danny and I chose from his companys catalog for hitting his 5 year mark with them). Thanks to all who sent the gifts.

I turned Alyssa loose in the house with our old camera the other day and she filled up the memory card with all kinds of pictures(99 picutes to be exact). Most of them were not worth keeping (pictures of walls, the floor, the TV, etc), but here are a few that I did keep. Ashley was the subject in a lot of the pictures. Why won't she pose like this for Danny and I?

I love her feet in this one.

She took like 5 pictures of Ashley's wet diaper trash can. I don't know why she thought it was so interesting.

This one is for Aunt Shannon :)

It just made me laugh to see some of the things that she thought should be photographed. I started reading a photography book the other day and the intoduction of it talked about how two people may be standing right next to each other and see totally different things worth photographing.

Bath Time

The girls have really been enjoying bath time lately. Danny took these pictures the other night while they were in the bath. I picked the most decent of the ones he took. Sometimes they will want to stay in there for almost an hour. They especially like it at night cause Danny will turn off the lights for short periods of time and move something in the room. They call it the Ghost game, in honor of Halloween. They love it.

Happy Halloween

We had quite the week of Halloween festivities. Alyssa got to dress up for her Library storytime on Wednesday. Then she got to have a Halloween Party at Preschool on Thursday. On Friday, we headed over to downtown St. Charles for trick or treating. The little shops on Main Street gave out candy from 3-5pm. Here are the kids dressed and excited to go get candy.

I was very grateful that Danny got away from work early to join us since it was a lot more crowded than we expected and parking was hard to find. He ended up dropping us off so we could get started. Ashley also got tired of walking about halfway through so Danny and I ended up taking turns holding Ashley until we decided we had had enough.

You can't tell from the picture above, but we ended up having to wait in quite a few lines just to get a piece of candy because it was so crowded. The kids found this bench during one of the waits which gave me the opportunity to snap a couple of pictures.

On Saturday we had our Ward Trunk or Treat. There were games inside the church for the first 30 minutes and then the trick or treating after that. This was the night we saved for getting Alyssa fully dressed. Here is our pretty princess.

She loved being able to wear lipstick and blush so much that she asked for it before church on Sunday. The black hairspray worked okay, but we had second thoughts later that night when we started washing it out. I don't think I would do it again inside of the house, because almost every surface in our bathroom was covered in black dust by the time the night was over and Danny had to wash Alyssa's hair like 5 times before it was back to normal (that is quite a task for a girl who cries if water goes near her eyes or ears). We found the M&M costume for Ashley and thought it was perfect for her because she is a little chocoholic.

The girls enjoyed the trunk or treat and were so excited to get more candy and see all of their friends. Here they are at the end of the night.

On Sunday, we decided to invite a few families over for our own Halloween celebration in order to keep our girls from being sad about not trick or treating like all of the neighborhood kids. We had dinner and then had some kid games. First was potato sack races. They loved this and wanted to do it numerous times.

The second game was Halloween Picture Bingo, but I was the caller, so I didn't get any pictures of it. The third game was Bobbin for Donuts. It was a lot harder than it looks. Alyssa tried really hard to do it without using her hands. I helped her a bit after she couldn't get close to getting a bite. Finally she figured out how to go from underneath and had a little more success.
Ashley just dug in.

After the games, we let the kids play upstairs so that the adults could visit. We found these two in the toybox and all of the toys outside on the floor.

It was a fun and busy week. We sent Danny off to Philidelphia around 6:30 this morning after a late night for the kids which will make for two, make that three, grumpy girls here at home today. We will look forward to seeing him on Wednesday.

Eckerts Farm

It hardly feels like Halloween is next weekend here. Our temperatures have been in the 70's and sometimes 80's, the sun has been shining, and we have been enjoying daily walks in the park. However, since it is almost Halloween, we couldn't pass up on the opportunity to join some friends for an outing to Eckert's Farm.

We took advantage of many photo spots and included some or our favorites.

Here are the girls with their friend, Haydn.
We enjoyed a delicious breakfast at a little country cafe on the farm.

The kids enjoyed playing in this little playhouse, complete with pumpkins and corn to play with.

We found this guy sitting around and invited the girls to sit on his lap for a picture. They thought that was pretty neat.

We took a tractor ride out to the pumpkin patch and took a couple of pictures before hopping on the very next tractor ride back. It was dry and very windy out there which made for a lot of dirt in our eyes. Since neither family planned on buying a pumpkin, we were happy to get out of there as quickly as possible. We just wanted to take the kids on the tractor ride.

The wind wasn't any better once we got back from our tractor ride, but at least there wasn't as much loose dirt around to blow up in our eyes.

We bought some tickets and let the kids go on some carnival rides to finish the morning off. Alyssa loved this boat ride.

Ashley and Haydn loved this airplane ride.

And Alyssa and Ashley loved the swing ride so much that they chose to ride it twice.

It was a fun morning out and even though the weather forecasts said we would get rained on, we didn't feel a drop (although it would have been much appreciated out in the pumpkin patch). The weather even warmed up to the high 70's by the time we left around noon. Thank you Roe Family for inviting us along.

Decorating Pumpkins

In order to avoid having to spend $10+ per pumpkin this year at a pumpkin patch, I went to our local grocery and got these babies for $2 each. A pretty good deal in my opinion for a night of fun decorating. Ashley loved painting her pumpkin with all of the colors of paint that we own. We can't figure out why she always ends up with paint all over her face and in her hair when she paints.

This princess dress-up kit was purchased for 50 cents and very much enjoyed by our little princess girl.
However, she didn't want to miss out on the fun of painting it too.

Ashley's finished pumpkin was very colorful and thickly painted. She likes to use the paintbrush like a spoon when she gets paint on it. It makes for a big mess.

Alyssa's finished pumpkin looked almost like the picture on the kit.

Now they are sitting on our doorstep and Alyssa's pumpkin has a few less accessories due to the foam pieces losing their stickiness and who-knows-what popping that balloon bubble. We love this time of year.