When winter comes early

we distract ourselves with thoughts of warmer times. (In other words, here are the promised reunion pictures!).


Some Lee and Maestri children:

Evelyn on the trail. (I didn't get many pictures of Andrew during the hike, since he was usually way ahead of me with his cousins).



This is what many parts of the "trail" looked like--trekking through water.

At the end, there was this nice little waterfall. The kids loved playing in the water.

Some of the bigger "kids" tried sliding down the waterfall. This is Dan's cousin Anna's husband, Sam.


This was Maggie, at the end of the hike. She had a pretty sweet ride, though.

Our life this past week has been much quieter. This was early week at the school, for parent-teacher conferences. Even though kindergartners didn't have officially scheduled conferences, I went to talk to Andrew's teacher anyway. I wasn't so much worried about his academic performance as I was his social one, but his teacher tells me he's making friends and is good about helping other children when he finishes his work early. (We also talked a little about the possibility of him joining the first-graders for math, since apparently both his reading and math abilities are well above average, but decided to keep him where he is since he seems happy).

Tuesday, we followed Evelyn's preschool class to the pumpkin patch, since Andrew had to miss this same field trip back when he was in preschool. We came home with two pumpkins and lots of prickers in our shoes from the patch.


Then we endured several days of cold weather. It snowed on Thursday and the city turned our power out for some maintenance work. We spent as much time away from the house as we could that morning, going to the library and to Evelyn's dance class and out to eat for lunch.

This weekend, we went north for a *very* short trip to see my parents and celebrate my dad's birthday. The cousins had fun playing together and they didn't make my dad *too* crazy, so I think that was a successful trip. We came down Saturday evening, since my parents were working in the temple and Sarah was entertaining Aaron's parents and so we didn't have anything else to do. For those we missed on our short trip (Jared, Sarah), we're sorry we missed you. You, however, are probably not so sorry to have missed us, since we think Evelyn now has pink-eye. Urgh. She woke up at 4 this morning crying because she couldn't open her eyes--they were stuck shut with the leakage from her eyes. (She'd woken up at 12 saying the same thing, but I was too tired then to realize she was speaking literally--I thought she just meant it was too early for her to open her eyes. Poor thing). Needless to say, she stayed home from church today and we're just hoping no one else gets it.

Dan stayed home with Evelyn today and Andrew and I went to church so that I could get my new calling: first counselor in the Young Women's presidency. I'm excited to work with the girls--the Mia Maids are all former students from when Dan and I were assigned to teach Sunday school. I'm also a little nervous--I haven't been in YW since I *was* a young woman.

In other news, this is one of my favorite things to see around our house recently: Andrew, tucked into the couch with a book. We went to the library twice last week because he read all three of his Magic Tree House books in two days. The bibliophile in me rejoices!


Finally, for the grandparents, here's Evelyn "reading" one of her new favorite books.

In case you can't quite understand her, here's what she's reading: Five little pumpkins, sitting on a gate. The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late!" The second one said, "There are witches in the air!" The third one said "But we don't care!" The fourth one said, "Let's run and run and run." The fifth one said, "I'm ready for some fun!" Ooooh, went the wind, and out went the light, and the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.