10K race

On Saturday, Mark, his brother Spence, nephews Dan and Stephen, and niece Rachel ran in a 5K/10K race in Chandler. The girls and I hung by the course (correction: Ava and I hung by the course, Mia hung by the bagel table and filled with bottom of my stroller with about 6 bagels with 1 bite taken out of them!) Mark and Dan finished in about 47 minutes (a 7:47 mile pace) while Rachel won her age division in the 5K and Stephen finished second (5K also)!

Good job dudes.

There were some pregnant ladies stretching before the race and I started to feel a little guilty and inadequate until I saw that they were only walking at a snail's pace.

Me at 24 weeks!!

This is for you Leslie. I know you are envious...

By the way, as a math-minded person. I am 60% of the way there!

Preschool Field Trip

Mia and I went on a field trip to Mother Nature's Farm and Pumpkin Patch with her preschool class. It was hot, and smelly, but fun. Mia got to pick a pumpkin then decorate it with foam stickers. I was gathering stickers for her from neighboring tables and returned and found that she had put letter stickers on her pumpking reading, "FUC Q". Should I be alarmed????

Ava, what am I going to do with you?

I opened a kitchen cabinet this morning, and found this graffiti, painted in Sharpie, on the inside of the door. I need to teach the perpetrator to cover her tracks better, I guess...

Winter grass time!

So Mark spent three hours scalping our lawn yesterday, in preparation to seed it with Rye grass which will grow like a Chia pet for the next 9 months, then die away revealing the summer grass which is all yellow and coarse anyway. My question is: Can't we just have permanent winter grass? We don't need summer grass anyway because it is too dang hot to go outside and enjoy it.

And I thought the cockroaches were gross...

Check out what my brother, Marshall, found slithering through his yard in Orlando, FL.

Chuck!

Our neighbors, Chuck and Traci, get a little too excited about Halloween, and deck their house and yard out with inflatable pumpkins, cats, and a giant Frankenstein. This year, they added a graveyard with a talking skeleton in a cage. We appreciate Chuck going so over the top that we don't feel the need to do anything except add a pumpkin outside our house.

Mia and Ava like to take nightly walks to Chuck's to check everything out.

We are really grateful that our bedrooms are in the back of the house so that his lights and ghoulish sounds don't keep us up.

Chuck's Halloween display is rivaled only by his Christmas with 2 Nativity scenes among other Christmas things.

We'll add the night shots later so you can see the inflatables in all their glory.