Happy Halloween!

Friday night was Trunk-or-Treat at the girls' school (parents volunteer to decorate the trunk of their car in the school parking lot and the kiddos trick or treat from trunk to trunk). We volunteered this year and decked out the trunk of our van with as much ghost paraphenalia as I could find...and then we spent a couple of hours passing out candy to equally decked out kids.
Cleopatra

Gypsy

Skunk

Oops--watch out for that ghost, little skunk!

Steve, Susan & Jeff (Rapunzel & Buzz Lightyear) and all the grandparents joined the fun on Halloween night for pizza & trick-or-treating. The girls had a spooky-good time (and made quite the haul!!)

Happy Halloween!!

Pumpkin Patch

We realized that we neglected to get any Halloween pumpkins for carving this year. Oops. It was such a lovely day, we decided to head on out to the "U-Pick-Em" pumpkin farm (really? They can't think of a funner name than that?)

Anyway--we had a great time searching the fields for the perfect pumpkins. We all had our own requirements for the ideal shape. I enjoy peanut-shaped (and found mine practically under a heaven-lit sunbeam on the side of the road). Sophie sought the perfectly round Cinderella coach, Emma wanted one with a nice stem and a few blemishes (but ended up with a double-humped whopper into which she carved two faces!!) and Julia just waited for one to speak to her. Success all around!

Got it!


Found you!


Bunnicula at the petting zoo...check out those 'fangs'

You KNOW we can't pass these up...ever!


Time to carve...



Sophie, Emma, Julia & Mama

Ever Hear a Dog Say...

"when will it end?"

You have now.

Waiting for Godot

Ok...actually Julia's just waiting for Emma to come home from the bus so she can challenge her to a Mario Kart duel. Still pretty absurd.

Gretchen Anne

My dear friend Patty just had her first baby on September 30. There is one more sweet angel among us on earth! Yay, Patty!

Proud Grandpa

In a Disused Graveyard

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

--Robert Frost

(Just because it's close to Halloween and we've been graveyard-hoppin', ghost-huntin', tree-gazin', ice cream-lickin' explorers yet again. And because it's creepy. And I like creepy.
Happy Almost-Halloween!)

--Historic Sunnyside Cemetery: Victor, Colorado

Fall Fun

It's that time of year again...time for our annual trek up Mt. Evans for our family photo. We always pose on the same rock...and have done so for the past 12 years. It's tradition. This year there was actually a full parking lot and a line to pose on that rock! We were talking to one lady who said that they come to "our rock" every year. How dare they! That's not their "our rock"--that's our rock!


Anyway, the nearby leaves seemed a little past prime but on the surrounding mountains there were still some good fall reds and golds.

We were the only people who brought a Beau Joe's pizza picnic (another tradition--yum!) and by the time we got around to eating it, everyone else had gone home and left us the entire place to eat and explore and play America's Next Top Model...the girls' favorite!!

Happy Fall!!

Random Bits

Emma said the kid who sits behind her in science class pushes his chair way back so his back is almost against hers.
And that grosses her out because he smells like meat.

Also, Sophie has been dying for me to post that it takes 911 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. She tried it. So now you know.

One other thing. Sophie and Julia decided they'd rather take gymnastics than be in Girl Scouts this year. They thought the girls in scouts were too squirley and they didn't enjoy it. The girls in Girl Scouts are squirlier than kids in gymnastics class? Woah! Now that's squirley! But at least they don't smell like meat.