Baby girl is off!

Miss Emmie Mae is officially a walker & officially keeping mama really busy! She's always walking, literally, just walking for sake of walking. She's so funny, we had no idea when she would start walking cause her 'learning to walk' process was SO different than the boys. She wouldn't hold our hands and walk with us, she wouldn't push the toys that the boys used to practice walking, she wouldn't stand when we'd try and stand her up, she'd only do it when she wanted to. But she did it exactly how I thought she would... she went from taking one, sometimes two, steps here and there to full blown walking. It's like she was just waiting to walk until she knew she could nail it.

And also true to her personality, it took days to get a video of her cause every time I'd get the camera cued up or try and get her to walk for me, she wouldn't. Here's the first video I got of her.

  

And this was a couple days later....

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is becoming one of my favorite days (of course, trailing behind bdays, Christmas & the 4th of July). I just love the excitement of the kiddos and any excuse to have a house full of friends. We continued our tradition of a little Halloween get-together at our house & trick-or-treating in the hood. 

Red Power Ranger, "Army Man" & the cutest little bumblebee

The boys wanted a "battle" picture.

Now that this little peanut is walking & always on the go, getting a pic was no easy feat.

...and they're off!

The perfect ending to a great night... PJ's and a movie with friends.

Cal was wiped, he passed out during the post trick-or-treating fun.

the kids were thrilled to get dressed up again the day after to go visit Oma.

Snake crazy.

We are in the midst of a major snake obsession right now... Seriously, Cal spends every waking hour talking about snakes, drawing and coloring snake pics, begging for a pet snake, making books about snakes, looking at snakes books, watching snakes videos on YouTube, making homes for his (pretend) pet snakes, his school work comes home with drawings of snakes, etc. So we surprised the boys with a trip to the reptile zoo in Monroe last weekend. They had no idea where we were going until we got there and they loved every single minute of it. So fun to be able to fuel Cal's passion. On the trip home they kept asking when we could go back.

Ian's excited!

we're here

Definitely the highlight of the trip, holding Kevin the corn snake.

Bennett holding Rainbow.

Black Mamba

Family hike.

We needed to get out of the house the weekend that Clyde died cause being home was such a sad reminder of his missing presence, so no better cure for a heartache than getting outside and going for a hike. We ventured up The Icicle to the Icicle Gorge Trail and we couldn't have asked for better weather. 

This & That

best buddies

book worm

Emmie started walking more and more the last week or so but she refuses to let me get any evidence of it. 

Lots of soccer...

A couple weekends ago Cal played in the local Apple Cup soccer tournament. His soccer coach put a team together of some of the kids from the regular team and then kids from other teams and wow, were they good. So good that they probably should have played up a division...

getting his participation pin.

And this last Saturday Cal had his last soccer game. As nice as it is to have our calendar open up (a lot), it was sad to see this season come to an end. These boys played so well together and were so fun to watch. They were seriously so good and finished the season undefeated.... not to brag at all. We hit the coaching & team jackpot, it's so cool to see them all grow together. And it's such a good group of parents too.