A Little Catch Up

I am wondering how many of us realize that is is only one week until Thanksgiving?!?! How does that happen? I am currently in Reno enjoying the city while my husband attends a conference. All the kiddos are with me and I wonder how the days seem to go by so quickly. Our lives seem to blow by at breakneck pace and yet I want to savor the special moments that I have with my children. I am working on a post for next week but wanted to share some of the things we have enjoyed this fall...

COLORS!!! I grew up in Southern California where we didn't have trees that had colors change, just nasty Santa Ana winds that made me wheezy and dry. I love the fall here in Chico. The leaves are gorgeous!  It blows my mind that God would again take something as seemingly sad as leaves dying and falling off a tree and give them vibrant hues of reds, oranges and yellow to remind us that he is in the process of redeeming things. He is truly in the business of making things new!

Yeah! We drove up to an apple farm in Paradise to buy some apples. It was a great day; nice and chilly and the perfect weather for making some pie! 

We also were able to make it to a couple of high school football games. My husband played in high school and still enjoys watching, but it is hard to get to games with little ones.

We live close to Bidwell park and during the fall these wild turkeys can be found wandering our neighborhood. It is so foreign to me to see these guys outside our house, but they have become part of the fall tradition!

This year Sienna wanted to hold up the embroidery hoop fall decor that I made. I like being able to add a bit every year to our decor pile.

We also had the privilege of going to our friends house for a kid's hay maze. It turned out great and the kids did not want to go! Josiah found this hat and wanted to wear it around. It made me laugh seeing him in it and walking around saying, "hat, hat."

Hoping we all remember the joy of the season. We also had family pictures taken by a dear friend. You can check them out on her blog here. (Ok, this is mostly for my family, but anyone feel free to check them out!)

Our Halloween

This year my girls were so excited for Halloween. I think they finally have clued in to what Halloween is. A great mixture for children: dress up and candy (a kid's dream, right?). I tried to persuade my kiddos to be a theme. I thought Tangled would be fun since we had some of the costumes, but to no avail. The girls both wanted to be princesses. Since we have plenty of princesses dresses on hand I did not make much for them, but poor unsuspecting Josiah, he had no choice in the matter. I thought it would be fun for him be a dwarf since my oldest was going to be Snow White. So I made a cute little dwarf costume using this picture as inspiration.

Isn't he cute! I wanted to only use fabric I had on hand (and that is a lot!) so that dictated the colors. I thought he turned out to be a pretty cute little dwarf.

I added little patches to his elbows and had a Velcro back closure. It really isn't a complicated costume, but I had fun making it!

He did have a hard time keeping that hat on! I thought about making a beard, but it would only have lasted one second. 

I'm pretty sure he ate about 10 suckers that day. Every time I looked at him he had stick coming out of his mouth. He was so excited to be able to go it was great. 

Here are some of all the kiddos!

One of the bigger bummers of the day was that it rained. The kids didn't seem to mind, but I got soaked. The worst part has been that it got all their candy wet and now it is all sticky in their buckets. Who knew such a thing would happen? 

We also do some pumpkin carving before Halloween. I love it because we are able to add a little story about how Christ picks us, cleans us out and makes His light shine into it apart of the night. You can check out a good post and the story here. I remember doing this as a child so it is fun to continue the tradition. 

Here are some of the pumpkins we ended up carving. I'll be honest, I love it too because my husband does all the dirty work of getting the seeds out and cutting them all up. I just get to sit back and enjoy!

 Until next time!