Pre-Halloween...

It was so fun decorating for Halloween in our new house! I feel like I finally have enough room for my decorations. ( I love to pick up cheap/clearance things after the holidays and have slowly been collecting things over the years. Also, I've inherited a lot of decor from my mom and Kathryn)

So, we set the mood in the house:

These rats were a new addition, my mother in law sent us up, I thought they were pretty fun! :)

Next on the list of things to do to get ready for Halloween was, of course, go to the pumpkin patch! We went up to Greenbluff with Taylor's pre-school. We got to go on a hay ride:

Me and my guuurl:

Taylor and her two friends, Amber and Lily:

The kids got a pollination lesson in the apple orchard:

It was such a beautiful day!

Then got to pick their very own apple:

In the maze with her friend, Lily:

And her friend, William:

Then she got to pick her very own pumpkin!

The talking pumpkin kind of scared her a bit. Here is her reaction right after it started talking. :) She immediately got up and ran about 20 feet back to listen to it.

Taylor ended up choosing a pumpkin for all of us, that sweet girl!

Tucker also got to go to a pumpkin patch with his class. I didn't go, so I have no pictures. But he did get to pick out a pumpkin and then they had a pumpkin decorating contest in his class. This is Tucker's pumpkin and how he chose to decorate it:

I thought it turned out pretty cute, and he won 'funniest' (?) pumpkin. I went in to help with the party and saw all of the pumpkins and man, I was impressed with the kids creativity! I mean, this was just a kit we bought, but some of the kids went all out! So fun!

We went to our good friends house to paint pumpkins with them. Taylor decided to go black and white with hers with pink sparkles on it! 

Sweet Avery helping Taylor decorate her pumpkin:

I love how Avery's pumpkin turned out, here is one side:

And on the other side, this:

The note just kills me! She did that one all on her own! :)

Tucker's pumpkin:

These two boys have to be the silliest boys I know, and together...sheesh! I love their sweet friendship. Tucker and Owen are BFF's and it's fun that me and Meg have been very good friends since we were 12!!!

It is my goal in life to get Kate to like me. She will never give me the time of day. So, when I had my camera out and she was actually looking at me and smiling and playing, I was pretty excited. Avery was making this face on purpose! :)

I had no intentions of doing any more pumpkins, but the kids found these 'Mr. Potato head' pumpkin kits that they have now. I forgot I got two on clearance last year after Halloween, so we went out and got 2 more small pumpkins and we decorated them Mr. Potato head style. Which was fairly quick and easy! :) My kind of activity!

Taylor's pumpkin princess:

And the kids posing with their pumpkins in front of the house. They are nuts!

But I do love everything about this picture. Taylor trying to be like her big brother, the beautiful fall leaves on our grass, the sun set reflecting on the house. Our new home (where our kids will be raised) and all the pumpkins in our front walkway. I just feel like it is so picturesque. I hope there are many more Halloweens to come in our home!

October for Taraka...

Besides what I have already posted about and Halloween, of course, here are a few extra things about my month of October:

Dyed my hair purple. Not all the way, just a few peek-a-boo chunks. This is not a very good picture of it, but I loved it! The only problem is...my friend who does my hair had never done purple before, so she used a new brand of color. The purple quickly faded to blue, which I thought also looked pretty cool, and is now a nice Teal color. More to come on that in a later post.

Busted out the old U-High track jacket to support my Alma mater high school. Three 16 year old kids were in a car accident at the beginning of the month and two of the girls died. It was very sad and tragic and our community really came together. U-High put on a Toys for Tots toy drive in honor of these two girls. It is what their families requested. Anyway, I donned my U-High jacket when I went in to donate toys. It was fun showing my U-High pride and being back. (although it is a new building, and not the one I went to!) :) I did see some familiar faces. Teachers that were there when I was there, and also a friend of mine that I graduated with is now a teacher and coach there, weird!!!

We had a youth activity at our house and they watched a scary movie, so I was banned upstairs with the kids. It was a pretty wild night with all the youth downstairs and all the kids upstairs! Here are Tucker and his good buddy from the branch, Brandon:

Ben went out of town for a long weekend for business, and to the kids that equals sleeping with mama time. So, this is what I woke up to every morning while Ben was gone! They are NOT fun to sleep with by the way. I initially told them they could sleep with me for ONE night, and somehow it ended up being all 5 nights!

And we did a lot of this:

October also means Primary Program time. We spent a lot of time working on it this year, and since I knew that Ben would be out of town on the actual performance and I would be sitting on the stand with them, I wouldn't get to sneak a pic of Tucker, so I snuck one at our practice! :) Tucker did awesome and it was seriously THE BEST program I have ever seen. (and I'm not just saying that!) :) The kids did amazing and the spirit was so strong! Tucker got to say all of his lines in English this year, we wanted all the kids to say them in a language they understood, so it was half and half English/Spanish. But for every line there was in English it was also said in Spanish and visa versa. He did have sing one verse of 'If the Savior stood beside me' in Spanish with two other little boys, and did awesome at that, too! Just like last year, everyone was so impressed with the way he spoke his Spanish. I really need to start teaching him more words. Although, the other day he did say out of the blue, 'Mom, look at that Arco Iris!' (rainbow) He knows that word from the primary song, 'I like to look for rainbows' So he's picking up something! :)

After the program, as a reward for doing so awesome, we watched Mormon Messages and ate popcorn and drank lemonade! I'm going to miss this primary room, lots of good memories and good friends here!

And since it's fall, and everyone wants their family pictures taken, and Senior pictures are due into the school for the yearbook, so everyone is hurrying to get those done.  I have been busy busy busy working on things like this:

And this: (I love making cards!)

But I've been very happy with my pictures, they have turned out soooo good.  I love doing seniors! But, i'm finally done for the season and it feels good. I love doing it, but I hate it when it becomes a burden. It is a line I have to learn how to draw, as it is hard for me to say no! But I'm getting there, I'm learning. I still love doing pictures, I don't love it when it becomes too stressful and not fun anymore.

Oh, and did I mention how we went for like 4 weeks straight of sickness in our house? Yeah, that was really fun! It started with Jackson getting a little cold and cough. I took him in after a few days, and he had an ear infection. 10 days of antibiotics. Also while we were there she saw Thrush in his mouth. I didn't even know what thrush was. My other kids never had it. So, 7 days of a medicine for that. Also a diaper ointment because it usually also goes to the diaper area. Which it did. It wasn't clearing up in the diaper area, and then his hands and feet started getting little red bumps and then Tucker started to complain his hands were itchy. Yup, hand foot mouth disease. Another thing I'd never even heard of. It starts in the mouth of baby, then he puts his hands in his mouth and it spreads, and you get the idea. I guess by the time it turns into red bumps on the hands and mouth it's already past the incubation stage, and you just have to wait the 3-5 days for the redness to go away. Oh, and that also goes into the diaper area sometimes, which it did again! This poor child. When it rains, it pours, I guess! But through it all, he was happy and smiley! Sweet little thing! Oh, and then our good friends come into town for the weekend and stay with us, and we after they got home their little guy got sick, and sure enough 2 days later, Taylor is throwing up, then 2 days later, Ben is throwing up and then Tucker is throwing up! All three of them got something. It was fabulous! Taylor threw up in her carseat, so I had to strip down and wash that, and the inside of our van. Then I did about 17 loads of just sheets that week! Good times! :)

This is what it looks like when I have to give medicine to Jackson while daddy isn't hear to hold his head still while I do it:

And then, because of the thrush, I had to boil the bottles after each use until it started to clear up, so I was doing a lot of this:

October was a fun one, for sure! Sometimes, looking back, I wonder how I survived! :)

**I know it could be a lot worse!!**

The beauty of fall...

I love this time of year! One major bonus surprise of our new house was how these beautiful trees turned in the fall. I love their bright red color! Here is what I got to look forward to while driving home every day:

Just one of the MANY reasons I love our house:

And they even looked so beautiful on the ground once they started to fall:

After one of his soccer games, Tuck wanted to go out and rake the leaves. So we both went out while Ben and Taylor were at the store and Jackson was sleeping. We had a fun afternoon of piling up the leaves, and then...

of course, jumping in them...

and just relaxin' a bit. He did get a bit discouraged the next day when the yard was once again covered even after all of our hard work. You will notice that the tree still has plenty of leaves on it! It was so beautiful during the month of October. I loved the leaf covered yards, it just totally made it feel like fall and Halloween and I just loved it! I even loved the work of raking the leaves!

Of course, once Taylor got home, she had to participate:

There is a park downtown just a few blocks from our church building, called Corbin Park. It is awesome. I took the Activity Day girls there last fall to take some pictures, and so we were early for an activity one day (Shocking, I know... but yes, it does happen every now and then where I'm actually on time to something!) :) Anyway...I took the kids to look at the leaves, and it did not disappoint. This was taken from inside the car, so it's not the best, but you get the idea:

Tucker had been collecting leaves from all over, so he had to hop out and get some:

I did a senior photo shoot up at Greenbluff at this beautiful orchard. I've been here a few times and they are always so nice about taking pictures. So, my friend Heather came to watch my kids while I took her daughters pics and I snapped a few of them just playing in the orchard! It was GORGEOUS!

That Heather is way too good go my kids! She loves them and they love her and I'm so thankful to have a friend like her!

And just look at how these turned out:

Beautiful. Amazing. Stunning!

Just one of the many reasons I love the Fall SO very much!