Fav pics from this week

Stick Out Your Tongue!

Walking

Playing with Links

Grooving to the Music

Tis the Season

The Christmas season is just around the corner, and that means sugar, family, and cold weather. After a hot Texas summer I'm looking forward to bundling up in a blanket with hot chocolate on a cold night.

We have a Relief Society meeting and service project coming up at the beginning of December, and below are some pretzel snowmen that we will be making at the activity. They were fun and pretty easy. I think they turned out well. I think this would be a fun family tradition to start.

And here are some other pictures taken today...

I walk into the room to find this...

...Jake's ears were cold.

An Early Halloween

Our ward had an early Trunk-or-Treat tonight. Eli went dressed as a lion. I wanted to take pictures of some our friends and their kids that were there, but Jake was helping the priests with their haunted house and I totally forgot about our camera in my purse. So here are a few pictures of just us from tonight...

Believe it or not, the picture below is of a happy, laughing boy.

ROAR!Time to go home!

Bobbing For Apples

Recently Eli experienced his first whole apple. It was de-e-e-elicious!

The Ants Come Marching Two By Two

This video pretty much sums up what we have been experiencing in our apartment over the last few weeks. Ants! Ants in the carpet, ants in our pants. It has been raining off and on here, and the ants will come in under one of the windowsills next to our fireplace after the flood water rises. Stinkin' ants.

One night they were so bad that we started vacuuming them up. As we were on our fourth or fifth vacuuming of the night, the vacuum stopped working! I plugged the vacuum into another outlet to see if by chance it was just the outlet that went dead on us, but it didn't work there either. The ants spent the next 24 hours taking over our living room. They were on top of the carpet, under the carpet, and I even found one dead ant on the inside of Eli's diaper plastered to his leg. When looking inside the vacuum (we have a bagless vacuum) you could see the ants burrowing tunnels and making themselves at home. I thought I was going to freak out.

Later that afternoon I took a shower and went to blow dry my hair using one of the same outlets only to discover that both outlets we had tried using previously were on the same circuit and were out. I reset the circuit and had an ant extermination spree. Take that for stealing my living space small creatures of nastiness!

Reading

Standing Up

Toy Joy

Ah, the thrill of a new toy.

Picture Update

Eli has less of a double chin in real life than he does in the picture above.

Book Suggestions?

I'm hosting our book club in November, and I am in need of a book club book suggestion. I had some good book ideas, but for some reason they don't have copies of the books in the Denton or UNT libraries. HELP ME! I know there are several of you who are avid book readers. What are your favorite books?

To give you an idea of what we have read recently in the book club, here are some books that have been on our reading list:

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collings
• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• The Life of Pi by Yan Martel
• Key Lime Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke
• The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom

Here are the books I was thinking about picking, but they don't have them in the library:

• Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Remen
• My Grandfather's Blessings by Rachel Remen (I have a copy of this and there is a copy in the Denton library, so this is a possibility.)
• The Peacegiver: How Christ Offers to Heal Hearts and Homes by James L. Ferrell
• This Is My Words by Nancy Turner (I haven't read this and there is one copy at the Denton library, so this is a possibility.)
• The Tao of Pooh by Hoff (I've read this, but I don't know if everyone would like it.)
• The Secret Life of Bees (I've read this and it is a possibility.)

Choosing a book for book club is harder than I thought because I want everyone to enjoy the book, and everyone has such different tastes in books. And this is a lot of pressure because this is my first book choice for the club, so I don't want to be known as the one who picked "that" book (said in a negative voice).

Suggestions please!

New Heights

Playing at the Park

Sick and Cuddly

We had a sick little boy last weekend. Eli had a high fever and he was super cuddly. Below is a picture of our little guy in the thick of his sickness. He wouldn't move from this position.

And here are some pictures taken today. All better!

Filling Wall Space

If any of you have been to our apartment, you know that we have one wall in our living room that is large, white, and empty. We've been wanting to fill the space with artwork that is nice, large, and meaningful, and we finally did it! I got out my rusty artist hands (I haven't really done any artwork since high school) and started working on a series of three pieces. Below is the finished product. Thank you, Jake, for the art critiquing and for cutting out the matting and doing a masterful job hanging the frames.

(Don't mind the flash bouncing off the glass in each of the pictures.)

(Pictures 14"x19" - Frames 19"x24")
(Charcoal & chalk pastel)
These three pieces represent the roles God plays in our life.

The Potter's Clay

Living Water

In the Palm of His Hand

Mama's a Comedian

We should really rename this blog. Something like, "The Elijah Show" or "The Excellent Eli's Extravaganza" would be more fitting. Clearly, whatever this blog is about, it's no longer us. With that, I give you the star of the show...

On the verge of mobility

Okay, So You Don't Like the Hat

Sunday Changes

Last week our ward split, so we went to church this morning like it was the first day of school. This time I got to sit by the two cutest boys in the class. There is no one new in the ward, we just kept a portion of the people from our old ward. Our entire Relief Society presidency is still in my current ward, so we were called again to our same callings today, which means an other year (plus) of being the Enrichment Counselor. Jake was also called to be Priest Quorum Advisor again, which he is very happy about.

Our ward now starts at 1:00. Not a good church time for the youngsters. Yes, we all get to sleep in a little, but boy does it mess with naps. Eli got about a 15 min nap at the beginning of church when he usually takes a 2 hour nap at home, and he was one cranky, wired boy by the end of church. We took him home for a nap afterwards, and he only slept for 40 min and woke up crying and upset. We finally managed to put him back to sleep, and he slept for another 2 hours like this...


Daddy is the best mattress in the house.

Here are some other pictures from our little family (okay, the reality is that all our pictures are of Eli).


If you click on the picture below to blow it up larger, you can catch a glimpse of his first tooth that came through (middle right side).


Below are some pictures of Eli playing with one of his favorite toys.