One, Two Buckle My Shoe

In November, Noah's kindergarten class was challenged to learn a number of things to earn feathers for their Indian headdress.  Noah memorized his address and our phone numbers and he learned to tie shoes.  Ignore the fact that my very dirty sneakers on the kitchen table -- instead celebrate this HUGE accomplishment.  We promptly bought Noah his first pair of "tie" running shoes.  Huge!

Independence Park

Ready?

Go!

Yikes! Man Down!

Poor Noah. Not how he wanted the race end.



So serious!

Here comes a tiny smile...

There we go!


This smile will look so different when his big teeth come in. It has been YEARS since Noah has had front teeth...


On a side note, still trying to get Noah into gymnastics.  Feel like he'd be so great at it.  He is insanely flexible and seems to love to tumble, etc..  Documenting it here so if he never pursues it, he can read this post and know that we kept asking him to try it.  :)

Noah

Snapped this picture to remember that for several weeks, Noah had a habit of coming home from school and continuing to wear his backpack for an hour or so.  It make me smile.

Visit with Gram and Pop

A little battleship, anyone?




Its so neat when kids jump from little puzzles to big ones, I think.  He's Griff's solo 100 piece puzzle accomplishment.


Super baking w/ Gram! (you'll notice these photos are in backwards order :)



Gram makes the BEST pie crusts from scratch.





Gotta love storytime with Gram, too.

The Force

Family Photo Swap + A Pinata

The Williams, the Hulls and the Browns met again this year for our annual Christmas card photo swap.





Thanks for our photos, Trish!




The kids love getting together.  I can only imagine how happy they would be if we all lived on the same street!


Since we had to cancel our Halloween party, we decided to save our pinata for our picture swap night.  The dads strung it up and the kids whacked away.










All the kiddos and their goodies!


The group!  (photos by Trish)

Morning Play

The older boys head off to school around 7:05.  Griffin's school doesn't start until 9:30am so we have a lot of time together in the morning.  Sometimes we play games (sorry, trouble, snorta, dutch blitz, chess) sometimes Griffin builds legos, and sometimes he begs me "please can I watch watch PBS kids!" :)  Love my time with this guy.  Really wish life made spaces like this for me with each of my boys every day.

Halloween!

The cul-de-sac around the corner from us has tons of fun families on it.  Allison, Thad and Jack live at the end of the cul-de-sac and they always host a super fun night-of-halloween dinner before trick-or-treating.














Griffin felt kind of sick again Halloween night.

I whipped my costume together 10 minutes before we left.  The spider had been hanging on our kitchen light for the month.  I evolved into a "man-eater".  I kept asking people to guess 'what 80's song' i was?


this is how much i scared blake and shawne :)

ironically, they both wore bloody plastic headband knives their heads that night.  in retrospect, wish they'd had them for this photo!

allison, thad and jack (allison gets 100% credit for this AMAZING party!)


Trick or Treat!