Happy Halloween!

Carving pumpkins

Here we are carving pumpkins. Andy and the boys picked batman/bat signal thing for one and I let the boys help me choose what kind of face to do on the other. Andy didn't think I was very creative, I'm sticking with the "I'm being a good mom and letting my kids help make the decisions" thing. He especially scoffed at the rectangle shaped lid. Hey, Avery wanted a rectangle, I did a rectangle. Andy's was a fancy star, which the boys also loved.
Anyway...both the pumpkins are adorable. The boys had fun scooping pumpkin guts out, and then we made toasted pumpkin seeds, yum!

Pumpkin patch - mostly pictures

Earlier this week we went to a pumpkin patch with my sister and her family. The boys were super excited to go with cousins. We went on free night so it was a little busy, but lots of fun. There were tons of things for the kids to play on, Jack was beyond excited. He kept squealing at each new play thing, it was adorable! I could barely keep track of Avery, he and Rebekah were running all over the place, from one thing to the next. I was happy both boys seemed to be in heaven!
We did not end up buying pumpkins there, we hit up Walmart for that, but we had tons of fun anyway. We just wish Andy would have been able to come with us!

Pregnant me

I've had several people comment to me that I'm "looking pregnant" lately. Um...I am pregnant. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond to these comments, so I just smile. Is my "waddle" that bad?! Is it a compliment? Are they pitying me? I'm not even sure.

A view from the top (29ish weeks?)

I am feeling very pregnant lately, this pregnancy has definitely been more trying on my body. Is it because I'm getting old? Anyway, besides a few little aches and some swelling in my hands and feet (not fun!)...and face?? this pregnancy has gone very well so far. She's kicks up a storm all day long, until Andy or one of the boys wants to feel, then she plays the shy card. Punky. I happily passed my gestational diabetes test, yay! I still have 9 weeks to go, but I'm hopeful it will go by fast since we'll be distracted by all the holidays coming up. We're very excited to meet our little girl, the boys call her "the baby sister" all the time. And I'm having fun making things for her room. She's already spoiled.

Here is a picture Andy took...2 weeks ago? He wouldn't stand up so my chubby pregnant face is even more pronounced. Oh well. I hope I'm not actually as ginorm as I feel!

It's getting cold

I suppose I should bog. I'm sure no one wants to see the picture of Jack on the toilet every time you visit the blog. :) He's doing amazing, btw.

It's almost November, how crazy is that?! Things I like about the season changing to fall are the pretty leaves, all the holidays that are coming, warm drinks, cuddling with my boys on chilly days. Things I do not like - that it's dark when I wake up in the morning (but really, who should be waking up at 6:30 anyway?! darn school!), it's dark when we eat dinner, and it's getting cold. I'm also afraid for winter. I don't want to be cold, yuck.

The boys and I have been enjoying some fun fall activities though, they've been begging to rake up leaves to jump in. So the other day after we picked Avery up from school we headed to the back yard to jump in leaves. They loved it and have been asking to do it every day. Unfortunately they aren't great at raking leaves themselves and I get tired after raking 1 pile. We'll go ahead and blame that on the pregnancy...not just laziness. : ) However, I'm sure we'll make it out to jump in leaves again soon. Maybe Andy will rake this time!

A couple weekends ago we headed to the local Amish community to do some shopping and let the boys each pick a little pumpkin to paint. They loved carrying them around, and also loved the mess of painting. notice the table is covered in plastic...I almost put them in plastic too! We now have cute little blue/green pumpkins decorating our buffet.

Jack rocks!

Jack and I have been working on this this week. And it is making us stir crazy! Luckily for us he is doing so well we're going to test him out with a short outing in the morning.

The first two and a half days were the hardest so far. All the bathroom trips made it so I haven't gotten my regular, and MUCH needed, pregnancy naps. So I was less than emotionally stable for the first half of the week. Luckily for me I have an awesome husband who took over some of the household duties and even took half a day off work to come home and take over potty training so I could rest. It was bad.

Jack has done amazingly well though, we're very proud of him and hope to have him fully potty trained soon! He loves earning treats and special prizes for using the toilet, and he gives us high-fives every time. It's really very cute. I'm just glad he seems to be catching on! I'll love being a diaper free house til December! : )
I also look forward to getting back to my regularly scheduled mid-morning naps!

Some crafty projects

Last week(ish) made my fall wreath, this week I worked on mod-podged letters for baby girls room (she has a name, btw. See below. : ) I need to do another coat of mod-podge on the top and attach some ribbon to hang them from, but I think they're turning out very cute. (The letters are leaning against a quilt I'm working on for her)

 I also saw an easy tutorial for a "quilt as you go" quilt method, so I took the leftover fabric from the wreath project and made myself a fall table runner for my buffet. It's much cuter than the piece of unfinished leafy print fabric I threw on there last week. And, I've never actually bound a quilt before (I'm really NOT a quilter at all, but I like sewing projects so I pretend to be able to do things I can't!) so I googled quilt binding and found another great tutorial on that. I'm a very visual person and it had lots of pictures so I was able to figure it out in just a few minutes. I worked on hand sewing the binding while watching General Conference this past weekend, and I love the finished product! It was way easier than I thought it was going to be!

Basement re-do

When we were looking at houses last year one of the important things on our list was a separate family room, preferably a basement one. I really wanted to be able to have a nice "formal" (as formal as we get, I'd never go as far as to say I wanted a parlor. That's too formal for us!) living room/sitting room and a separate place to have all the toys and the tv.

When we looked at our house we loved that it have a finished basement, and thought the space was perfect. It even had 2 "rooms" so we could have a family room AND a toy room. There was no wall to define the spaces, but the room was a large L shape so it worked just fine. After we moved in we decided we'd love to build a wall with a door to close off the toy room and make it a 4th bedroom so we have the option of having a guest bedroom. And while we were at it why not throw in some built-ins around the fireplace in the family room to hide all our junk.

We had some of the work done a few months ago and the rest this past week, so after a lot of painting, as of this weekend (thanks to Jensen Construction!) we are proud owners of a newly finished basement! complete with french doors, a fresh coat of paint and lots of custom storage to hide all our tv cords, games and whatever else we can cram in there!
And one of the best parts? I can close the door to the toy room and pretend there aren't toys and books covering the entire floor! Because, lets be honest...I cleaned the toy room so I could take this picture. It looks like that about 10% of the time : ) LOVE it!

What's next?! : )