Happy Halloween!!

       

from the little tiger.

PS – yes, that’s a lot of pictures. I just had a hard time choosing because he is so cute :) And my family doesn’t get to see him dressed up, so these are for them.

Birthday Festivities

I’m pretty far behind on blogging, and I don’t really have a good excuse – I’ve just been lazy :) And I    feel a little odd writing about my own bday, but in the interest of getting it documented, here goes.

To celebrate my birthday, Nate enlisted his brother and sister-in-law as babysitters and took me out to dinner at the Cheesecake Factory on Friday night. This fun dress was one of my bday presents from Nate – which I picked out a couple months ago. I (well, “he” I guess) got a smokin’ deal on it at a damaged-dresses sale. Since it was my birthday dress, he decided I should wear it to dinner. I felt slightly self-conscious about being dressed up when some kids came in obviously on their way to homecoming, but then I got a couple of compliments (one from a complete stranger at the mall) and decided to just have fun being dressed up. My accomplishment for the day was making the accompanying sash (which the “damaged” dress didn’t come with) out of scraps of fabric, while 1) sitting in the car at Sugarhouse park that afternoon, 2) sitting in the car feeding Bennett, and 3) driving over to drop Bennett off with Nate’s brother. It’s definitely not high-quality, but I was just glad I pulled it off.

On Sunday, Nate’s meetings started later than usual so he made me a yummy breakfast, then after church he was able to get out of some of his meetings and come home early. We went up to his parents’ house for dinner and the annual trip to the pumpkin patch in their garden to pick out our pumpkins. We had a delicious dinner and cake, and spent the rest of the evening relaxing.

Several of my former roommates also have October birthdays, and 3 of us who are within 5 days of each other currently live in Utah, so we got together to celebrate a couple days before. It was fun to catch up with them. Here are a couple pictures of the combined birthday dinner.

I also got together with Laura on her actual birthday to help her celebrate. We found a free pumpkin patch to go to and I have to admit my first thought when I pulled in was “this is not what I pictured”. I think I had seen too many pictures of people’s visits to more exciting pumpkin patches with hay rides and pony rides and animals, etc. This one was pretty much just a pumpkin patch, which actually worked great for us because Bennett and Grace wouldn’t have appreciated any of the fancy stuff anyway. There were plenty of places to pose them for pictures :)

 

(in case you’re wondering what kind of strange jacket I’m wearing, it’s actually the Baby Bjorn. I should have just taken it off)

What we’ve been up to…Bennett’s first blog post

  My mom was having a hard time thinking of something to write on her blog, but said that she wanted to write something because it has been a while. So here are some things we have been doing:

* mom and dad left me with grandma and grandpa  last Saturday so they could go to a furniture sale. They were buying stuff from daddy’s work. They  must have found some good deals because they were excited and there’s a new big black thing in the garage. I think mom sneaks down there to work on it when I’m taking a nap because I hear scraping noises. I especially like pulling mom’s new basket off the coffee table shelf.

* daddy was gone for a few days last week. I heard him saying something to mom on the phone about work and conference and “everything’s bigger down here”, whatever that means.

* grandma Cindy sent me a new tie, and I got to wear it for the first time on Sunday. She said I looked pretty cute but I was mad when she made me stand by the window because I just wanted to eat. I’m glad I can look like my daddy now.

* mommy keeps making me sit in weird places and holds this big black thing up in front of her face, then makes silly faces to try to get me to smile, then the big black thing makes a “click” noise, and she tells me how cute I am. She keeps leaving me on Tuesday nights so she can learn more about her big black thing, but I’m not sure I like it because she comes home and makes me sit there again. I was nice and tried to show her my new teeth in this one.

* on Sunday mom and dad put me in my car seat and took me up a really windy road by our house. They kept saying how pretty it was and talking about the different colors, but I was just mad because I was stuck looking out the back window and couldn’t see much. They did let me get outside for a few minutes so I finally figured out what the red and orange and yellow trees they were talking about looked like, and why mom kept saying it was sooooooo pretty.

 

* dad’s been working on his typing machine a lot. I can’t quite figure out what he’s been doing, but mom and dad keep talking about “MBA” and “essays” and “accomplishments” and “GMAT” and “recommendations” and “applications”. Those are pretty big words.

* we got to go to a fun restaurant a couple weeks ago. Mom said she used to go to the Art City Trolley restaurant with her friends when she was at BYU, and talked dad into going with her. I thought it was pretty fun to throw my toys on the ground. Not fair that they got to eat yummy food and I just had to sit there.

* mom and I got to see my uncle Jake and aunt Stacey and cousin Kallie last weekend when they were visiting. I was laughing at mommy trying to play rock band – if she would have only let me hold the guitar I could have shown her how it’s done. We went to Brick Oven with them and Stacey’s family, and I got to sit in a big boy high chair and eat my applesauce.

well, I’m off to take a nap. I need to be all rested up for the big game tonight!