Family Time

I'm trying to play catch-up with my posting. We've had a couple of really nice days lately with no rain. We've taken advantage of the cool, dry days and gone to the park just a block away. I tried to get some good pictures of Isla since I haven't done studio pictures yet. Bliss and Zade just love their little sister so much and she absolutely adores them.


Here the boys' tried to be creative and according to Bliss were Wiki-tiki's like in Scooby-Doo. They soon realized the error in their shenanigans as they remembered their dad would soon be home and ran to the bathroom. Hurriedly they tried to get the marker off and that's when I realized I had given them the non-washable markers. They were stained for about 3 days despite all the scrubbing I did. Of course this was also the day that I burned the beans that I was to put in the chili I was making. (Side note: I would say 75% of the time I burn beans when I'm cooking them because I forget about them. So this time I figured I'd use my trusty pressure cooker. It said just to recover them after soaking them over night. Obviously their definition of "covered" and my definition of "covered" are two separate things as I burned the mess out of those beans. It smelled horrible in the house. Sadly it reminded me of my grandparents' house...50 years of cigarette smoke saturating everything.) After the bean incident, I threw in the towel and called Blasen to let him know we were going out for dinner. Good idea, right? Well, yes and no, as I had children covered in marker stain that somewhat resembled bruising in the dimly lit restaurant.

Last night we carved our pumpkins. I know it's early, put Grandpa Archibald and Great Grandma Archibald brought pumpkins on Saturday and Bliss has been dying to carve them. He's really been in to celebrating things this year. He helped me drag out Halloween decorations last week to put up outside and around the house. The boys had lots of fun getting dirty digging all the seeds out. As they carved, I washed and cooked seeds to eat after they were done. Zade decided to have the Batman symbol on his pumpkin while Bliss stuck with the traditional scary face. The large pumpkin is waiting for me in the refrigerator. I think I'm going for simplicity and will use power tools to carve it. Very appropriate for our house, I think.