October and November

One of our many Philadelphia Zoo trips to come (since we bought a year pass...I hope we make good use of it!). 

How do you like my new stamp station all set up?  I have one more long table now along the left side that gives me a lot of work space.  I haven't been able to use this area much yet.......OH, BUT I PLAN TO.  Notice my little collection of rainbow pictures that my kids have made?  It is still growing, and I call it my "rainbow wall".  It's one of my favorite collections : )!

Isn't this a funny picture?  Goldie had a sticker book for making faces, and we got pretty silly with it one day.  Good times.

Hay ride for Tootie's preschool class.  A very cold day...I love these fun field trips.  It's one of the best parts of being a mom.

Tootie and I carved 2 of the pumpkins.  If you look carefully at the one on the left, you'll see a special secret (secret to this blog) in the design!

We had fun at the S'mores Night at Hershey's Chocolate World.   This singer guy was a good entertainer at the campfire party.

One of the highlights of our November was getting to meet Grandma and Grandpa at the D.C. temple and visitor's center on the day of their temple trip with their soldiers.  The kids thought the soldiers were pretty fascinating, and this man was kind enough to answer questions for them and pose in the picture with them.  I thought it was funny how they were afraid to stand close to him in the picture though, and this is as close as I could get them.

Happiness!

Can you believe these amazing sunsets!!?  This is a scene from our back door.

I had to come up with SOME way to celebrate 11-11-11, and this is what I came up with--a yummy cake : ).  And I was able to take a picture of my computer clock at 11:11 on 11-11-11, too.  It was very cool.  Oh yeah--I almost forgot~we also hid coins in the cake (washed, of course), in increments of 11 cents!

(11 candles, of course!)

Tootie's class did an elaborate Thanksgiving program for the parents, full of songs and stories of the first Thanksgiving celebration with the Pilgrims and Indians.  Lots of fun!

He made his own vest with real Indian writings on it.  Oh, that smile of his--it gets me deep down : )!

Our Thanksgiving Day feast.  YUM!

Our guests this year were the two full-time elders that are serving in our ward.  We missed being able to get together with family, but it was still a really nice day for us.  Shark and Jazz had a nice time in the morning too, playing in the Turkey Bowl with other friends from the church.  We played games (Scattergories and "Write to 100") after the meal and had a great time.

This is our handsome family scientist--testing whether play dough dries faster in the house or outside.   What do you guess that he found out?  He flattened both dough balls into pancakes, and he observed it for 3 days.We were surprised that our hypothesis was wrong--the play dough outside showed practically no signs of drying after 3 days, and the play dough inside was a crispy cracked white thing.  We took photos and he presented his findings on a big display board, and got an A on the project : ).  Way to go, Scientist Shark!