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.