From a different perspective...

When Zoey first started going to public bathrooms, she quickly distinguished between the mens and womens symbols. Ross rarely took her (due to the fact that male restrooms are just gross) so she always went with me and we went into the "girls" bathroom. Well, she can go in by herself now and clearly distinguishes between the two. Max has a different (and very cute) perspective that I just realized recently. He goes with both Ross and I pretty equally, so as we passed by the bathroom the other day he said, "that is to go with mothers, and that is to go with fathers!" How funny that he distinguishes them by which parent he goes with! This is a good thing, because I am not ready to have him complain about going into the girls room with me when he is not a girl and I am not ready to send him in to the mens room alone!!

Dairy Farm

We made it to a local dairy farm the other weekend. It was filled with pumpkins, kiddie train rides, hay bales and a very LARGE maze. The maze was so big (over 3 1/2 acres), the kids got tired and we couldn't find the four different stamps we were supposed to find to complete the mission!! It was interesting to get so close to the corn stalks though... Anyway here are the kids on a tractor...

and each of them taking a turn posing on a big tire!!


Zoey driving her train car...

And here is Max in his...

Big jumps over the hay bales...




yeehaw!

Pumpkins... Pumpkins

It is that time of year, so we headed to a dairy farm and pumpkin patch and of course took lots of pictures. I will just put pumpkin pictures for now. I have some from the dairy farm too, where the kids sat on tractors and jumped on hay bales...

The funny thing is that our house is now built on what used to be a big pumpkin patch...

This one is taken inside of a HUGE barn that was 115 years old!! It was put together with wooden pegs rather than nails. It was pretty cool.

Here are the kiddos in front of the house! Pumpkins are much cheaper here than in California!! Ha, Ha!!

Wordless Explanation

Well, not completely wordless... I have to write a little bit.

When we had our crazy 11 day power outage, we talked with a couple of you on the phone and tried to explain a few things... Like, why in the world was it taking SO LONG to get the power back. Well, a quick explanation was that the trees and power lines are just so intertwined and it was (from my new perspective) a lack of preventative maintenance with the trees and the power lines... I could have taken a hundred pictures from our house to the park a mile down the road showing this to be true, but I decided on just one picture... it doesn't show entanglement, but the other extreme... I guess we love our trees here way more than power!! (UM, I don't think I'm in the concrete jungle of LA anymore...)

Not to be outdone...

...by her brother, of course. Zoey had to do her own video. So here she is...

Max Dancing and Singing

Max was singing and dancing the other day and I tried to capture some of it on video. They always change a little when the camera gets out, but these are pretty good. Here he is giving initial instructions... jump left, jump right...



And here he is again. He is watching himself in the oven while he does it!

Zoey's Birthday

Here are just a couple more pictures of Zoey's Birthday. These are from her actually birthday. We went to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, and she wore her crown! And then came home for presents and cake. Here is she is in the tiara...


Here she is opening just a couple of little presents from us:




And, admittedly this was probably more exciting for me than for her, but here is another cake!! There is a neat little cake shop in town, so I decided to get another one for her (we had a cute Littlest Pet Shop one for the party). Anyway, when I asked her what she wanted, she was so cute... "Butterflies, and flowers and just anything from a garden!" They did a nice job and it was oh so delicious!