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.

Our New Addition

Danny finally gave me something that I have wanted for a long time now. We figured with Alyssa turning 5 in a couple of months that it was a good time for it. Here is our new addition...

Danny found it on Craigslist. When we were going over to look at it, I didn't have high expectations. We had a 2 month period awhile back where we looked at a lot of pianos that were advertised on Craigslist and none of them felt right to me. When I sat down to play this piano, I felt a lot better about it than I had with any in the past. It is badly in need of a tuning job, but it sounds good to me considering. We think it will be a good piano for us as we are teaching our kids how to play and keeping the little ones from touching it. It is a definate improvement from the keyboard that I have been using to practice for the past 5 years.
Alyssa has shown a lot of interest in the piano recently and since this one has been in our home, she has asked me numerous times to teach her new song to play. I will probably find her some piano books to give her for Christmas and then start teaching her for real after that. So far it has mostly been "Chopsticks" and some other simple songs like that.

Another 5K

I ran another 5K on Saturday. We started training for this race during the first week of August. Our original plan was to run it in under 30 minutes and that's what we attempted to train for. Due to our vacation and Rachel, my ruinning buddy, getting sick 3 weeks before the race, we lowered our expectations and decided that just doing better than the last race was good enough for us. However, I think both of us thought in our minds that we might not even do better than last time. Ashley giving me a good luck hug.
Because this race was in October, they invited participants to dress up on costumes. Rachel and I laughed about it and wondered how anyone could run a 5K in a costume. Apparently it can be done.

All I know is that I would not have wanted to run in this costume.

Here I am crossing the finish line (Gray shirt, black pants).

Around the 1 mile marker, we realized that our original goal of finishing in under 30 minutes was actually a possibility. Unfortunately, it didn't happen. My finish time was 30:20, just over my original goal. I was a little bit dissappointed, but still happy that I cut 57 seconds off from the last race. Here I am after the race.

Rachel is a good exercise buddy for me. It's nice having someone to motivate me to exercise daily. We had planned on this being our last race for awhile, but having finished so close to 30 minutes, we are thinking about running another race in November to see if we can reach our goal of under 30 minutes.

Playdough

We are going through a playdough phase in our house. I can't remember how it started. I just remember something happening that encouraged me to pull out the long hidden playdough. However, when I found it and pulled it out, I realized that my playdough stash was all dried out. So I used a recipe that Gawbie passed on to us a long time ago and made our own homemade playdough (it is a recipe that uses kool-aid for the coloring). I even let Alyssa pick out the color. She picked her favorite color, purple, which also happened to be grape flavored. It turned out pretty good and has provided for hours of entertainment since. Alyssa loves that it smells good.
We had these playdough toys with the dried-up stash that we had gotten in a happy meal or something a long time ago. The girls love using them to make "cookies" and faces in their dough.

It makes a big mess of our kitchen floor and table, but they sure love playing with it.

Our Trip to California

WARNING! This is a very long post with a lot of pictures. It's hard to choose your favorites when there are 200 pictures to choose from.

Danny had a conference in San Diego this past weekend, so we took advantage of his company paying his airfare and we went along to take our girls to Disneyland for the first time. Here they are dressed and ready for an exciting day.

Grandma and Grandpa Miner went along to enjoy the day with us. They have season passes and we enjoyed having two more adults along to help out with the girls. Here we are on the tram ride from the parking lot.
After walking from the tram drop off to the front gate(carrying Ashley), we all decided it was worth the money to rent a stroller for the day. Grandma and Grandpa were nice enough to pay for it with their pre-paid Disney cash card. Here we are waiting for them to return. As you can see from the picture, Alyssa and Ashley are in awe of all there is to look at.

Before we got there, Alyssa had told us that she was most excited to ride the teacups ride. Here is she is fulfilling her wish.

Her favorite princess is Snow White. When we started talking about Disneyland a couple of months ago, we told her that she could wear a princess dress to the park. She told us a couple of weeks later that she wanted to wear a Snow White dress. Fortunately, we found one at a consignment sale at the end of August. At Disneyland, we had to do the Princess Walk in order to meet the princesses. We were fortunate that Snow White was one of them.

I included this one too because I thought it was cute that Sleeping Beauty got Alyssa to hold her dress out like a princess.

Of course, the girls had to meet Mickey Mouse too. The wait was a lot shorter to meet Mickey than it was to meet the princesses.

This picture doesn't have anything to do with our day at Disneyland, I just thought that Alyssa looked like a little model in it.

Grandpa was nice enough to push the stroller around all day and stay with Ashley for all of the rides that she was too little to ride (we were sad to discover that she was just one inch too short to ride everything that Alyssa could. We were happy, however, that she could ride as much as she could. One of the benifits of having tall children).

Ashley was most excited about going on the train. We went on it right after she woke up from a two hour nap in the stroller(which Grandpa so kindly held back on two wheels so that she could sleep laying down for most of that two hours)

I wanted to get a picture in front of the famous Sleeping Beauty Castle, but there was too much excitment to start riding rides at the beginning of the day and the front of the castle was blocked off at the end of the day, so we had to settle for our picture in front of the Disneyland sign on the hill.

We were glad that Grandma and Grandpa came with us, even if the girls don't look very happy abour it in this picture (they were pretty tired and clingy at this point).

The very next day, we headed to Pasedena to meet up with Grandpa Wheeler, Aunt Maryn, and cousin Robbie. We started with lunch at McDonalds. We were going to go to a park, but it was a cold and drizzly day, so we opted for an indoor playplace. After lunch, we went to a children's museum, called Kidspace. All three kids had a blast.

It made me laugh to see how creepy Ashley looks crawling out of this ant hole.

Alyssa crawled out so fast that I made her get back in it so that I could get a picture of her.

They loved riding these little tricycles. Alyssa liked driving Robbie. Robbie didn't like that so much.

I think Danny was making them laugh in this shot by pretending to be a spider (they are standing on a spider web). We had a fun day with some of the Wheeles and both kids fell asleep on the way home.

That night, Danny left us to go to the Dodgers/Padres game at Dodger Stadium with his Dad and brothers. He spent the night at his brothers house and then went on to his Conference the following morning. We missed having him around, but were glad that he was finally able to get some relief from his cat allergy (My parents own a cat who was banned from the house while we were there, but that still wasn't enough to help Danny).

On Thursday, we headed back to the Disneyland Resort to go to the other Amusement Park, California Adventure. Alyssa was excited to ride some more rides.

She got to meet another princess.

She got picked to dance on the stage for the High School Musical Steet Performance.

There wasn't as much to do at this park, especially for Ashley, so it was a much slower paced, relaxing day. We were worried when we started the day off with two grumpy, sleep-deprived kids, but they got better once they saw all the fun stuff around them. We stayed even later this night so that we could watch a "World of Colors" light/water show over the water in this park. Ashley fell asleep in her stroller during the show and Alyssa fell asleep on the tram ride back to the car. They both slept all the way home and didn't wake up on the way to their beds.

We spent a peaceful morning at Grandma's house on Friday and then headed off to the beach after lunch. It was a nice beach day considering it was the end of September. We were fortunate that Friday was the first day of a week-long heat wave. The water was a bit cold, but that didn't stop Ashley from getting soaked. Alyssa liked playing in the sand. I helped her build a sand castle.

There were plenty of feathers around as there were plenty of seagulls. 50 of them enjoyed sharing our caramel popcorn that we left unguarded when I had to take Alyssa to the bathroom. It was probably one of the most expensive snacks they had ever gotten into as it was leftover from Disneyland. I had flashbacks to another beach trip that I took with Danny when we were engaged, when we watched a flock of seagulls inhale a bag of chips that belonged to some people next to us. It was one of the first good laughs that we remember sharing together(you know, the ones where you laugh so hard that you cry). This time I was on the recieving end of the laughs which were heard by the people sitting next to us. Alyssa and Ashley had fun chasing the birds away with me.

We spent Saturday recovering from our busy week and flew back yesterday. It was a really fun week and Alyssa's newest favorite place to go is Disneyland. Her favorite rides were "It's a Small World"(Disneyland) and the Grizzly River Rapids ride(California Adventure).