We’re just finishing up an exciting Fall Break. We headed to Ogden to visit my family on
Wednesday. Thursday we had a Halloween Party at the park with the Shupe cousins
(except for Carter & Jacob who were with their mom and the Reeve girls who
stayed home with their new baby brother Jack since my kids had colds and they
didn’t want to risk catching anything).
We played at the park, had a spooky Halloween relay, a doughnut eating
contest and ate mummies dipped in blood (hot dogs in a blanket in ketchup) and chips.
We all headed up to Logan after the party, picked up Grandma
Toone and went to the Pumpkin Walk which is so much fun and one of my favorite
things to go to in Logan.
Friday we went with Grandma Toone to the Fall Harvest Festival at the American West Heritage Center. We had a blast. The kids loved the train and pony rides, jumping off hay bales, sliding down the giant slide, going through a box maze and part of a corn maze, and feeding the goats. We got together with Kathy’s family in the evening for pizza. It was a great visit and we went home Saturday morning, giving us a couple of days to vacation from our vacation.
As far as our day to day routine, each day is eventful. Last week I took the kids outside to ride bikes. I ran in for a minute to put Amelia’s
crutches away (more on that later) and I came out to find Amelia sitting on her
walker’s chair, holding onto the handles and rolling down our steep
driveway. I started running as fast as I
could to catch her before she hit the street and fortunately she didn’t
crash. I think Amelia was pretty calm
through the whole incident although I was screaming. Amelia is getting to be pretty independent
and isn’t afraid to do things like going up/down the stairs by herself. It makes me a little nervous though because
although 99% of the time she doesn’t need any help, if anything startles her or
if she gets distracted she does lose her balance. Amelia is walking so well with her walker now
that her physical therapist made her a pair of crutches. Amelia can stand with
them for a few minutes.
The twins
are now in toddler beds, actually we just took the front rails off of their
cribs. To make Amelia’s bed more accessible to her, we cut the legs off of it
so that she can climb in and out of the bed by herself.
Abigail is
now 19.8 lbs which we felt was close enough to turn her car seat around. Abigail
is talking a lot more although she is hard to understand. She loves Elmo and
wears her favorite Elmo shirt as much as possible. She’s very picky about what
clothes she wants to wear and as soon as she hears the word “bath” she strips
down and runs to the tub. She and Amelia fight quite a bit.
Natalie and Thomas are great helpers. They love to play
outside and with their friends. I'm trying to teach them the piano. I don't play the piano, but I have some musical knowledge and my sister Camille recommended these super fun and easy piano books (My First Piano Adventures). The kids love the songs and are getting where they are really making music. Thomas wants to start playing the violin, and had his first lesson with Grandpa Shupe over the weekend. We’ll
probably wait until next summer to really start him.
Thomas is loving kindergarten and is reading pretty well now. He has a good amount of homework every night but it's fun. Like last week he had to plan a trip to any country in the world, make a postcard from that country and color which clothes he would wear to that country and glue them in his paper suitcase. He
chose South Korea, and so Jared helped him a lot on the project since that is
where he served his mission. Another homework assignment Thomas had was to
play catch with us and make a graph showing how many times he caught the ball.
