Thanksgiving 2011

Every good Thanksgiving includes a little wrestling time with Daddy.

Lots of fun cousin time.

These pictures are from our nephew, Will's, birthday party which included a great tractor ride! (They look cold above, but thankfully it was only chilly here in the shade. We had GREAT weather for the rest!)

Collin LOVED it! He excitedly pointed out all the horses and tractors and ponds he could find.

We all had a great time!

We even got to pet Will's grandpa's horses.

And the brave kids got to feed them carrots too.

Dave must exhibit some form of body language that says, "wrestle me!" because our nephews Will and Jack ended up getting him too. : )

I thought the cousins were so cute all lined up here....

Dave helped his dad with the leaves at their house and a huge leaf pile was created.

Hard to find Benjamin in all those leaves.

Anna could really get some air (she was jumping off one of the logs) and had a blast being her wild, adventurous self.

A lot of fun was had by all.

Benjamin and Anna love to have their Aunt Katie read stories to them!

Benjamin's cousin, Luke, doesn't even like grapes but he ate them with his big cousin. They are really cute together!

See the love?

Pilgrims

Got myself pretty behind on here....time to play catch-up! : ) 

Somebody in our family has been working pretty hard these days and burns the candles at both ends. Poor guy!

Dave was so sweet and spent a Saturday baking brownies with the kids and having them make cards to take to our local fire station. The kids excitedly climbed in the car and we drove over only to find the firemen weren't there! We went to lunch and came by again and they were still gone. So we had to eat our own brownies and will just have to try again some other time.

We had fun doing school projects for Fall/Thanksgiving. Benjamin seemed to really enjoy learning about Thanksgiving and made a book to go along with all we had learned.

My little pilgrims working on a puzzle together.

Fall Leaves

Dave has some good helpers this year!

Our neighbor stopped by with some homemade cookies for the boys.

Collin just kept licking his fingers after the cookie...

Sweet boys!

Not-so-sweet Daddy, who kept piling more leaves on our boys.

Zoe after the second hair cut I've given her. It is REALLY hard to groom a dog!

We decided it was time to finally wake up our sleepy girl so she could enjoy some fun in the leaves too!

New Museum Exhibit

We hadn't been to the Children's Museum in several months, so we decided to go and check out the new Treasures of the Earth exhibit they have. It's pretty cool and the kids loved it. Here they are tunneling through rocks of an ancient tomb...

Anna with some hieroglyphics.

Then it was time to put on our dive gear and go exploring in the ocean deep.

Benjamin was so serious measuring all of his finds.

Anna cracks me up! Every time I would take her picture, she would hold her breath like this. 

Even Collin got in on the fun!

After taking his dive gear off, Benjamin enjoyed putting together pieces of a plate from a shipwreck.

Then it was time for them to get their digging tools out and try to excavate pieces of Terra Cotta Warriors in China.

Anna was concerned that this warrior's head was missing.

Then they had fun putting the warrior pieces together.

Little Collin with the warriors.

Warriors Benjamin and Anna.

Collin was super tired on the way back to the car and had quite the meltdown. I picked up some rock candy suckers for the kids at the gift shop and finally got him calmed down to enjoy his on the way home. The poor little monkey was so wiped out that he fell asleep after just a few minutes....

That morning we also had Collin's two year pictures taken. He did such a great job! (I didn't buy enough to get the CD, so these are just pictures of the pictures we did buy.)

Two year collage we bought.

Our favorite!