September - part 1

I have a ton of pictures from September, so here is the first group, minus Joel's first day of school pictures, which I posted a while back...

Right at the beginning of the month, our good friends the McCutchens drove all the way up from Santa Cruz and stayed with us for 4 nights! Originally this weekend was supposed to be a reunion with several families from our Chicago days, but it was hard to coordinate 5 busy families and it fell apart. We missed the Strombergs, Stroms and Backlunds...but are also thankful that we were able to have this mini-reunion with our two families.

We had a wonderful long weekend together...as always we ate good food, played games, laughed a lot, and had fun watching the kids play. One day we got to go to the zoo...
The polar bears put on a great show! It was hard to get good pictures, but they were play fighting with each other and jumping and splashing in the water!

Greg & Brian took the kids frog hunting one day, and they caught a ton of frogs again.
Violet thought this was pretty cool.
Baby Jack (4 months here) is such a sweet and mellow baby...

but for some reason he was not sleeping well on this trip (we found out later that he was teething!!). He would wake up by 5 every morning and Emily would go out and take him for a 3-4 mile walk! This was a picture she took of the sunrise over Mt Rainier.

Thank you so much for making the trip up here! We miss you!

Maren also started school this month! She is going to a pre-school 2 afternoons a week. These pictures were taken at the open house day:

Love this little face.

It might be hard to see, but she wrote her name at the top of her paper and did such a good job coloring!

This was taken on her actual first day of school - what a big girl! I'm so proud of her.
I help out in Joel's class every other Thursday and the first week of school we made these shirts. Each class in the school has "adopted" a college and Joel's class is the Oregon State Beavers! I printed the logo on iron-on paper and cut them out, then the kids got to help iron them on their shirts. The turned out really cute, and they all wear them every Monday!

The rest of these are just random silly pictures.

Two little monkeys jumping on the bed:

Sweet kids.

August...

August was a very busy month...we had something going on every weekend!

Early in the month, we spend a long weekend in the gorge with my family. Grandpa & Grandpa Thomas were there (my parents) as well as my sister Rebekah, her husband Dave and their son Dean. My camera died the first day there, so I only got these few pictures...but we had a fun time eating good food, playing games, going on walks by the river and hanging out in Hood River.

These three played together really well...we weren't sure how it would go, but it was so great!

Finding frogs & snakes, probably...

The next weekend Amit came from Boise to spend the weekend with us. We had a lot of fun playing outside (they caught this frog while on a bike ride in Orting), eating out, and Amit even made us 2 indian meals...yum!! I didn't get any pictures of him :( but we are so glad he came to visit!

Random...girl after my own heart!

We also got to spend a weekend camping with the McMullens!! Molly and I share a "love" (read dislike) for camping, so we decided to brave it together! We had such a fun time! (Ok, I don't really hate camping, it's just that it's so much work to be the adult planning a camping trip - thanks to my parents for giving us great memories all those years camping at Fort Stevens!! I had no idea how much work it was!!)

And the kids had a blast, which made all the cold, dirty, and noise and work worth it.

We did not have good weather, but the kids braved it and went swimming in this little lake.

Burrr...

yawn...

We are so thankful for our friends!! We had a fun time playing Yahtzee and talking by the campfire when the kids went to bed!

Thanks for a fun weekend, McMullens!

And then, there was FROG HUNTING!

Greg found a little pond/swamp in the greenbelt right by our house and there were "thousands" of baby frogs in there!

So of course they went with nets and buckets and brought a bunch home!

Maren thought they would enjoy her princess pool at least as much as the swamp...

Love it
These special popsicles came from the ice cream truck. 2.50 each. They spent their own $$. :)

It was worth it just to get these pictures...you can see the joy in their eyes.