Happy Halloween!

This is one of my all time favorite Halloween Photos. It's from Jack's first Halloween when he was six months old. Yes, he is really inside of the pumpkin. It was super duper cold in there, but he sat inside of it happily, if not a little bit bewildered. The next photo in the series shows him munching on the side. Yum.

Incidentally, this is the photo that landed Jack a contract with a real live, well known modeling agency (we lived in LA after all) but that's another post. And although the experience was scary enough to make for some good Halloween frights, it'll have to wait for another day. We've got pumpkins to carve!

Have a hauntingly horrible Halloween, one and all!

The Knock

If you have just a minute, head on over to my dad's blog. He's got a great You Tube video of Zöe playing one of the games from last week's school carnival, which she's dubbed "The Knock." And she's been a legend in this house ever since...especially since the boys played shortly after and scored a big fat Zero. Girl Power!

180 Degrees

What this nice fall, pumpkin patch, hayride photo doesn't show you is what was to be found 180 degrees in the other direction. And that would be the enitre population of the greater Portland Metro area out on Sauvie Island getting their pumpkins on Sunday afternoon. If we'd thought for 10 seconds we could have guessed it. But we didn't. The siren song of a crisp, sunny fall day clouded all of our judgement. And it really was beautiful. And it really was busy. And we really did wait in a very long line of cars to get back over the bridge. But once we were across, the line of cars coming in stretched for at least two miles. And then I was really glad that we were heading home, pumpkins thumping together in the back of the van.

Kickin' It

That's a misleading title actually. "Kickin' it" would likely imply that things have been chill, when really they've been anything but. Have I really not posted since August?!? Yipes!

We're all good, school has been great. There's lots of homework to be done, soccer balls to be kicked, food to be made, friends to play with. The hours from 3:00 to bedtime pass in a whirlwind, and for that matter the hours from breakfast to 3:00 seem to pass just as quickly. My friend Holly and I have done five (five!) Fairy Birthday Parties this past month alone. I haven't written about this secret fairy life of mine yet, and I will sometime in the future. For now we'll just say it's a very fun creative outlet and the closest I think I'll ever get to being anything remotely like a rock star. Considering we've done maybe five parties total in the past year, five in one month has been enough to make even the most orgaized fairy's head spin. But fun, they're always fun.

And I've been making skirts. The first one started off as a purse like this one, and morphed quickly and efficiently into a skirt for Zöe. Then that morphed into selling skirts to lots of girls we know. You know that patchwork thing. It's just so pleasing to sit and put different fabrics together. And I get so excited about it, each new combination better than the last. I feel like stacking them up on my head and meandering around the neighborhood, "Skirts! Skirts for sale! 50 cents a skirt!" Well...not quite like that. But you get the idea. So if you know a girl (I've done sizes one through ten so far...) who is in need of a patchwork skirt, please email me and I can give you more details. My friend Lila has requested a grown-up version, so I'm playing around with how to make that happen.

That's it, in a nutshell. Just kickin' it.