Early Bday/Frankenstorm Dinner!

So, since we'll be in the air flying towards the happiest place on Earth on Chad's birthday, we had an early birthday dinner for him tonight.  Also, Hurricane Sandy is expected within the next couple of days, and will probably bring high winds, 6+ inches of rain, and power outages.  They are calling it "Frankenstorm"  :) We figured we'd better get our happy bday singing and cake eating out of the way early!

Now off to batten down the hatches!!

Carving the Pumpkin

Time to carve the jack-o-lantern!  The girls were really excited for this annual tradition.  It is so neat that they are finally at an age where they can remember our holiday traditions and look forward to certain things.  I was surprised this year, because Hannah actually got her hands dirty!  Last year, she wore gloves so she wouldn't get the pumpkin goop on her hands.  She was all about it this time!

Here is Daddy preparing to cut the top off, while the girls watching intently....

I'm ready for pumpkin dissection!

I'm soooo excited, Dad!!

It's the goopey-goop!!

Action shots...

They worked hard to clean out the goop and then Hannah carved most of the pumpkin herself.  I gave Sadie a chance, but given the latest incident with scissors (see new hair do'), she stressed me out with the carving utensil. 

The finished product...all lit up :)

Vegetable Soup

On Friday, our girl scout troop took a cooking class at a local farm.  The girls got to harvest their own veggies, chop them up, and make their own vegetable soup.  Though Hannah wouldn't dare put a veggie in her mouth, she was perfectly happy to chop food, and cook her own meal.  She really enjoyed this!
Here she is with her friends harvesting beans...she found a curly one.

All the girls with their homegrown loot...

Sweet girl :)

Chop, Chop, Chop...

Yum!

Then we made peanut butter & jelly sandwiches (with home made peanut butter, of course), and sat down to enjoy the fruit of our labor!

Pumpkins

This past weekend, we ventured out to Meadows Farms (a local nursery) and picked a large pumpkin for carving, and a couple of smaller pumpkins for painting.  This was a fairly easy task, seeing as there were not many pumpkins at this particular location to choose from!  I have the worst luck trying to capture cute Fall pictures of the girls.  It's either too windy, or too sunny, or too something!  I think this photo had it all going on....too windy, too bright, too heavy...

Look, I found one Mom!

Here's mine!

And later that afternoon, we painted pumpkins outside.  The weather was gorgeous!

Roll over, Beethoven

For our latest girl scout meeting, I planned for a guest speaker from the local animal shelter to come teach the girls how to care for animals.  She brought their 4-legged "mascot", Max, a huge St. Bernard dog.  The girls loved him!  One of the girls noticed that he looked like the pup from the movie, 'Beethoven'.  :)

Daddy's Helpers

Helping Daddy plant some grass seed....

Whatever you do, DON'T step in the grass seed!

Oops, I think I stepped in it...

Hannah's First Race!

Last weekend, there was a fun local Kids Race and we signed Hannah up!  She's been asking to run with me  for the past several months, so we got her some good running shoes and signed her up.  She loved  it, and she is FAST!!  She was a bit worried about going by herself, so I decided to run the .36 mile course with her.  When the race director shouted "GO!", Hannah shot out and took off!  I couldn't even keep up with her.  I think she just wanted to make sure that she beat her ol' Mom.
Pre-race photo :)

Limbering up!

Here she comes!

Heading for the finish! (you can see me far away in the distance-lol)

Post Race Pic ...with her ribbon, tropical smoothie & water!

Proud of our runner!

Sadie was cheering for Hannah, and two other friends running the race, Makayla & Conner.  The signs were so lovingly made by MomMom!