pressing onward

As promised, here are some pictures from our trip north this weekend. Jacob was celebrating his birthday (as you can see) and Jeni brought some cute owl cupcakes which the kids enjoyed (okay, so they only ate the frosting).




These two (the youngest of my parents' grandkids) crack me up. I can definitely see a family resemblance, can't you?



Justin kindly entertaining my kids before church Sunday morning.

Dan took this shot of Evelyn last week--she refused to nap in her bed, opting instead for the body pillow on the floor next to her bed (the one time we moved the pillow to wash it, Evelyn--of course--fell out of her bed in the middle of the night, two nights in a row).

Evelyn has this thing for markers--in particular, she likes to draw on herself. This particular one makes it look like she's been getting into the vampire craze a little too young.

And of course, Andrew at preschool.


Evelyn has been working the costume thing this week--you can see her in her princess skirt (above) and a pirate costume: she also went out (again) in her Tiana nightgown and a kitty leotard, complete with black skirt, leopard-print top, a tail, and kitten ears . . . I suppose most little girls go through a phase like this. I'm just glad she's cute enough to pull it off (I certainly couldn't!)

In other news for the week: we got new windows! Actually, we got them week before last but I forgot to post that. This winter promises to be warmer than last, since we finally replaced all the single-paned windows in the bedrooms.

And we got our car back. Finally. Of the four weeks we've owned our minivan, it's spent three in the shop. (To be fair, it wasn't entirely the shop's fault--they rebuilt our transmission, put it back in and took the van for a test-drive and noticed that it was still making noise so they deduced a faulty part in the transmission; they took it apart again and couldn't find what was wrong, so they ordered another used transmission and rebuilt that for us--without charging us any more than they had originally quoted, despite the fact that it was so much more work for them). It's so nice to once again enjoy the luxury of going where we want, when we want. However, I am grateful that we live in a small town when many things (including the grocery store) are within walking distance.

What else? We survived the second week of classes and spent the first day of our three-day weekend working (what else are you supposed to do to celebrate Labor Day?). We finally tore out the ivy on the front of the house (and took out some plants with it, including a rose bush that was pretty enmeshed in the ivy's roots). The front of our house looks bare now, but we're glad we got the ivy down, since it's been on our to-do list since we moved in.

We also picked Bubby and Poppy's garden for them, since they were enjoying a lovely vacation. On our way over, we told the kids that we were going to pick food from Bubby's garden. Evelyn responded enthusiastically, "Oh, great! I love food." So do we, kid, so do we.