Visiting with the Halls

We love to visit with our good friends, the Hall family, whenever we're in Lexington. These pictures are from our most recent visit with them, which was a couple weeks ago. The girls really enjoy playing with the Hall boys: Austin, 6, Nathan, 4, and Tyler, who will be 2 in January. As you can imagine, there's never a dull moment!

Here they are playing with a bouncing Tigger toy. Caroline especially liked this one, as does Tyler (barely visible in the background).

Next up is Caroline on every kids' favorite: the hobby horse! Once she realized she could make it bounce all by herself, she was all set for quite awhile. I think you can see how much fun she's having! (and there's Tyler again!)

Here's a picture of Ted with his hands full after lunch (that's Nathan, Tyler, and Jordi he's got!) We ate at Culver's Frozen Custard & ButterBurger. It was delicious!

Their kid's meal comes with a coupon for a free Frozen Custard. Here's a picture of Nathan enjoying his... chocolate, I believe!

And here's Jordi, making a valiant effort to enjoy hers! For those of you who don't know, Jordi will emphatically state that she does like ice cream... hot ice cream, she says. (I don't know what that is either, BTW!) Anyway, the other kids were getting some, so she was determined not to miss out. She only toughed it out for another bite or so after this one. What an expression!

Caroline's New Look

As you may have noticed in the Pumpkin House post, Caroline has a new hair-do. Her hair is thick & wavy, and as it gets longer, it's becoming a little harder to manage. However, these little pig-tails are really helping to keep it neat & off her face! Plus, aren't they cute?? But, I think they also make her seem more grown up, too (more 'little girl' than 'baby') ...but I guess that's what happens when you're almost one & a half!

Happy Halloween!

Yes, 3 weeks late, but here they are... pictures of the girls in their Halloween costumes! For the non-Nick Jr.-savvy readers of this blog, I will tell you that they are dressed up as characters from "The Backyardigans:"

Here's Caroline in her Pablo costume, enjoying one of her treats. According to Jordi, Pablo is Caroline's favorite Backyardigan. (I'm not sure how she came to that conclusion, but I'm inclined to think it's because that's the only one of their names that her sister can pronounce!)

Here's Jordi in her Uniqua costume, posing next to one of the pumpkins from yesterday's post. Notice that we have a happy face on our jack-o-lantern. Jordi specifically requested a pumpkin face that was "happy", not "mad." (Although, she did tell me that maybe next time it would be OK to carve a "mad" face because "when I'm bigger, the mad face won't scare me!" How 'bout that?!!)

Chris was in charge of passing out candy to the trick-or-treaters, and, boy, did we have a lot of them! In the pouring rain, no less! Anyway, the girls had fun hanging out with Dad, watching all the kids in costumes come up on the porch. We also braved the rain & trick-or-treated at a few of our neighbors' houses. Once we ran out of candy (which only took 40 minutes, by the way!), we turned off the lights, went to Nana & Grandad's house, and ended our night over there. All in all, it was a lot of fun for everyone!

Pumpkin Adventures

Yes, it's been too long since our last post. We've got weeks of happenings to catch up on! I'll start where we left off at the end of October with some Halloween-related pictures:

The weekend before Halloween was unseasonably warm around here, which made for a nice afternoon for viewing the thousands of jack-o-lanterns at The Pumpkin House. It's located in a nearby town, and is quite a site to see!
Here's a picture of the girls posing on the front stoop (I like that you can see the sign in the background!)

Here's Chris & Jordi in front of an impressive wall of pumpkins. Each pumpkin is carved to be an different instrument in a symphony, and of course there's a pumpkin-head conductor, too. The theme was the 1812 Overture, which was playing on a continuous loop. The really neat part was the synchronized lights in each pumkin that lit up whenever that particular instrument would be playing. Did I mention that this is some guys private home? and that he just does it for the pure enjoyment of it? Apparently, he takes the whole month of October off each year in order to complete this enormous undertaking. Wow!

After seeing all those pumpkins, we were fired up to carve our own pumpkins. Here's Jordi browsing through the pumpkins, helping to pick out just the right ones...

And, here we our, taking our purchases (and the girls!) on a ride to the car. This may have been their favorite part of our whole adventure!