Christmas pic swap

My friend Jamie and I did a little family Christmas card photo swap.  So you will probably be getting one of these in the mail.  We forgot about daylight savings time and the fact that our children are nuts on Sundays due to schedules being thrown off so we each had about 10 minutes to snap some photos.  Thankfully we each got a few.  We did them on the UVA campus.  Super pretty in the fall.

26 Weeks

26 down, 14 to go.  Hopefully only 13 to go.  Logan and I have made our bets about baby girl.  Logan says he thinks she will be bald, I say lots of hair.  Logan's estimated due date is Feb 17th around 1 or 2 a.m.  I say Feb 15th around 4 or 5pm.  Logan guesses she will be 7 lbs 2 oz.  I said 6 lbs 12 oz.  Can you see a pattern here?  I hope for a beautiful girl with loads of hair born at a nice 4 pm who is small to deliver.  Whereas Logan apparently wants a bald baby who is bigger to deliver at the wee hours of the morning and a few days later.  Geez.

And PS, don't mind my hair.  I am in hair crisis and can't figure out what to do with it.  Isn't that always the case though?

Vroom Vroom

As long as I can remember Jack has loved cars.  It started with wheels when he was just a few months old and then progressed into cars and now it is any transportation.  I have bought him a few non-transportation toys and he thinks they are ok, but he just loves cars.  He is getting older and more into imaginative play.  One of my favorite children's toy is blocks so I decided to make him some road blocks.  They weren't too much effort and pretty cheap and thankfully he loves them.  At first we just did roads but now we built ramps and tunnels too.  I could play blocks all day with Jack.  It brings back my childhood memories of building elaborate cities with Staci and driving mini micros on them.

Trick or Treat on the Lawn

No worries, this is my last Halloween post.  The big tradition in Cville is to do the UVA trick or treat on the lawn.  They open all of the dorm doors and TONS of candy is provided (seriously these kids get hooked up) and the kids can trick or treat to 52 doors in one place.  So Jenna and I braved the bus system on our own and went to central campus with Olivia and Jack.  Our husbands of course could not attend.  It turned out to be a success and really fun.  Jack was thrilled to ride on a bus.  Once we got to the lawn, we only hit 7 or 8 doors because the kids didn't really care.  They were more interested in the dressed up animals, balloons, and leaves.  We were fine with that.  We hung out for a while and then caught a bus home.  I am excited to take Jack next year when he "gets" Halloween a little bit more.

He has an odd expression here, but he really loved the bus.

Jack and Olivia admiring a dog dressed as a butterfly.

Playing in the leaves.

Admiring a pig dressed as a bee.  Or a bee dressed as a pig.  Its hard to tell.

Where is Waldo?  Can you find them?

Enjoying a Halloween treat.

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After a long day of Halloween fun we had the traditional soup and bread.  My mom started doing this on Halloween when we were in high school and I liked it so we will carry it on.

Versatile Halloween

We were super excited when our friends invited us to a Halloween Party because it finally pushed us to have a night out without Jack.  Our kind friends offered to chill at our place and play the Wii while Jack slept.  Without little Curious George though our costumes no longer made sense.  So with a few adjustments we became Bio Hazard people.  I think I was 3 lbs lighter that night from sweating my self to death wrapped in plastic.  It was a fun party and we loved everyone's costumes.  I won the candy corn count because I cheated off Logan's nicely calculated answer of how many were in the jar and tweaked it by 5.

Our morphing costumes.  We are bio hazard people.  Notice that since I have goggles and a mask on I no longer know how to make eye contact with the camera.  It confused me.

A picture with our hosts the Fowlers aka Mini and Mickey.

Vanessa Bunker (Peter Pan), Me, Courtney Neilson (pirate) and Allison Vadomske (Ursula)

Vanessa and Derek as Peter and Tink

Trunk or Treat

Our ward had a chili cook off and trunk or treat.  I was amazed at how many crock pots of chili there were.  Also people did a great job dressing up which is also fun.  We have never been to a trunk or treat before so we weren't sure what to expect but I think we did it right.  We were Curious George and the Man and Woman in the Yellow Hat.  So we decorated our trunk like a jungle.  Jack was so cute trick or treating and he even said thank you too.  His favorite treat these days is suckers so when ever I remind him how we went trick or treating he says "suckies!"

Curious George in the Jungle eating his "suckie".

Two little Monkeys.  This is Jack's buddy Kai.

I got Jack's costume on sale but refused to pay 30 for Man in the Yellow Hat costumes so somehow I pulled these together.

Jack and Olivia aka Little Orphan Annie

Greenfield Farm

As Stephen Colbert would say, this is the first installment of my 5 part series on Halloween.  There was oodles of Halloween activities for us to attend this year.  The first one we did was with the Virginia Law Families at Greenfield Farm.  It was a crisp fall day and a great way to start off our Halloween week.  Jack loved the many many slides and tractors and trucks.  There was a giant slide, a corn maze, animals, pumpkins, and a hayride.  We about killed Jack with our lack of communication when Logan sent Jack on down the giant black slide and I was not prepared.  Poor kid got some serious whip lash.  Thankfully he was willing to try again and ended up really liking it. 

Jack playing with trucks!

A slide.

And another slide.

And another slide.  The one that almost killed the boy.

Feeding a turkey.

We let Jack pick out his own pumpkin.  He chose the pumpkin that was half way rotted and brought lots of fruit flies into our home.

Pumpkin Pumpkin

Halloween has been so much more fun this year now that Jack is officially a human.  He helped us carve pumpkins and even though I expected him to not really participate, he had a blast scraping the seeds and goop out of the pumpkins.  We first carved pumpkins for FHE and then frosted the traditional sugar cookies. I let Jack frost his own and he quickly discovered it was much more delicious to just eat the frosting like mom does.

Jack and Logan appear to making the same expression here.

Jack requested a blue pumpkin.

After 24 long weeks....

We found out on Halloween we are having a girl! It's been killing me to wait this long. Logan was able to come to the appointment and we ended up toting Jack along too (not by choice).  But Jack did really good and we still got to enjoy it.  Everything looks good and she is healthy and super squirmy.  A lady in one of my playgroups said she always drinks 2 cups of coffee before hand to make sure her baby is moving and they can see the sex.  Haha.  No I didn't drink coffee but I may have munched down a few mini Halloween candy bars before hand just in case.