Go Vote for Me!

Hi there! Hope everyone is doing well. Still having photo upload problems here... but working on the issue. I probably have a virus or something, so one of these days I will have to go fire up the old desktop and do pictures from there...

Anyway, I entered a contest to win a wii, so go vote for me here!!

Happy early Thanksgiving to everyone!! Hope your celebrations are wonderful!

Hello, it's been a while

:) I'm sure its all because I made fun of Ally that now I haven't posted anything new since Halloween!!

Seriously, several times over the past couple of weeks I have tried unsuccessfully to upload pictures for your enjoyment. Every time I try, I get a page load error that says the internet connection reset itself while trying to upload and interrupted the connection. Grrrrrrr. I don't know what the deal is (obviously my lame rural internet service provider?). But its really annoying. So I apologize for lack of cute and funny pictures, and promise to get some up as soon as my internet stops getting all quirky. I have a few good ones :)

Not a whole lot new going on here. We are just still all giddy about Obama's victory :) And just waiting until January!!

Oh its been really cold here. It was a whole whopping 4 degrees this morning. And its been snowing off and on. No real accumulation (maybe an inch a couple of times). But I'm sure we will be burried in snow in no time ;)

Now I just need to figure out how to keep Beatrice from pulling off her shoes/socks/gloves/hat. I don't think they make buntings for 15 month olds. But I might have to check.

Other than that.... pictures will come some day - hopefully soon.

Spooky Stuff ;)

So nevermind that the pictures are lacking order... for some reason I have a hard time getting pics in the right place with Mozilla, but like to use it to blog because of the integrated spell check feature ;) (yes, it is that hard to just push a spell-check button). But of course I tried to use iexplorer to mess around with the picture order, but it is messing with me and not loading... grrr... so anyway... you will see the completed pumpkins here before the carving pictures... The pretty girly pumpkin is mine, all mine ;) It just didn't look quite as fancy glowing. Maria's is the next one here, she started out trying for one of the fancy template designs, but she chose a particularly difficult one, so decided to just free hand it here and it turned out great.













And Mike's turned out the scariest! Duncan was checking out those big teeth! On the other side of the scary one, Mike carved one of the template designs, its a wolf howling at the moon! And as much as we love pumpkin carving around here we love roasting those seeds even more! They turned out yummy!



We did most of our trick-or-treating in Winter this year, more houses to go to. The kids had a blast! Duncan actually said "trick-or-treat" a few times, it was between houses, but with all the houses decorated and people dressed up, he was a little preoccupied ;) We did get him to say "thank you" a few times though.
The funny thing was that last year the first house we went to Duncan just ran right in and made himself at home, of course the old couple had invited us in, but it was just funny the way he went right in and sat on the couch. This year it was the last house we went to and he did the same exact thing, ran right in and sat on the couch! The lady got a big kick out of him and he actually told her trick or treat and thank you. And she gave him a big kiss and an extra piece of candy :)

What a slacker ;)

It seems like I'm posting more and more infrequently... At least not as infrequently as Ally ;) (no new post since like June or July?)

Anyway, we are getting all geared up for Halloween here! I'm sure I will take bunches of pictures and post them sometime this weekend. We will be carving our pumpkins tonight! Nothing like waiting 'till the last minute eh? Of course we got the pumpkins a few weeks ago and had nothing but good intentions. And I've been meaning to go look upstairs for our Halloween decorations all month, but somehow I lost track of time. I kind of doubt we'll have any trick-or-treaters anyway. We haven't the last 2 years.

What else has been going on around here? Well, little miss Beatrice learned how to climb into the rocker and is completely thrilled with herself :)


Duncan enjoys his time in the rocker too... looks kinda like a big sandwich.And did I mention that Beatrice is my major attitude baby? ;)
And Maria is just as happy as ever! :) She's really looking forward to Halloween! :)

And did I mention that it snowed here this week? There was a dusting on the ground Monday morning... and then it flurried all day! It was cold! But luckily the snow didn't really stick. I'm just not looking forward to the snow!

Just a Little Something

Maria went to her early Halloween party this past weekend. She had lots of fun. These people really go all out for Halloween. They ran around in a cornfield and played games and had tons of snacks. We let her stay the night this time so she wouldn't have to leave early and miss out on all the real fun :) They ended up staying up until 3am! She was a little tired on Sunday when I picked her up. But she did have lots of fun!

I just love this picture of Duncan. He looks so pensive :) Doesn't he look like such a big boy? We have been working with potty training for the past few weeks, and really he's not doing too bad. Of course a lot of times I'll ask if he want to go use the potty and he will tell me "oh no. later mommy. oh no. tomorrow." But some days he will actually go quite a few times in the potty chair!

Beatrice is doing really good with her solid foods. And boy does she love her pizza crusts! See how tight she's clinging on to it with her bottle there? She's getting that walking thing down pretty good and is just about running around :) And she's become quite the climber. She figured out how to get herself into the toybox ;)


Mmmm. Whip cream and chocolate syrup on ice cream! :) And Duncan wears it so well.


And did I mention that Beatrice likes to climb? She can get halfway up the child gates. But now her latest craze is climbing on to the couch to jump. Several times I left the room to come back and find Duncan and Beatrice gleefully jumping on the couch. Many time-outs for Duncan and many putting the couch cushions back on later I figured out who the real culprit was. I came back into the room a little sooner than expected and caught Beatrice getting the cushions off. And this is how she does it :)


There is an Eagle's nest across the street in one of the neighbors trees. I was able to catch a picture of this guy here who sat in that tree looking at us for a really long time. Beautiful.

Anyway, so that's our latest :)

Harvest Time

The weekend before last was the beginning of the cranberry harvest for the tribal cranberry marsh - which Mike's brother Pat runs. Amazingly, Maria and I had never gone by while the harvest was going on, so we made a point to go by this time.
It was pretty neat. They drive this big machine around that knocks the berries off the vines. You can see in the close up picture that the water looks red because there are tons of cranberries floating around on the water.






























And I just had to share this cute picture of Beatrice sitting on daddy's lap and hugging her Eeyore.

The leaves are a changin'!

And it is so beautiful around here! For the past couple of weekends we've taken some Sunday drives just to soak up the beauty :) and of course to get out of the house...

Last weekend we took a drive through the Chequamegon National Forest to get some pretty pictures, and then headed to Copper Falls State Park to hike around the falls.


The falls were really neat, it was the first time me and the kids had been there. When we started on the hike, Mike lifted Duncan up on his shoulders. Duncan first started saying "Don't you fall Duncan, don't you fall!" And he had death grip on Mike's neck :) Then a few minutes later he started saying "Don't you poop on my back Duncan, don't you poop on my back!"
We had a really nice hike. We made it about a quarter of the way when we decided to cut it short. We had already gone a really long way and us adults were getting a little tired with all the extra weight :) And also we heard a low grumbling coming from the trees...





After the hike, we decided to go do dinner in Ashland by Lake Superior since we were already so close. Once we got there we decided just to picnic in the car as the lot was swarming with hundreds of seagulls (that may be a slight exaggeration). I was so glad we made that choice when Mike threw out some bread from his sandwhich and about 50 gulls totally dived for the open window! It was crazy :) They are a little hard to see in the picture, but all those white dots are seagulls :)