October

Seriously? Must October be over already?

Here are the highlights of the month and an overload of photos...

My birthday included fun packages from my family and Pete’s family, a surprise heart attack on my door (thanks Rosey and Braelynn!), a delivery from the sweet tooth fairy (thanks, Heidi!), cheesecake and Mexican food at the Atkin's home the night before, breakfast from Pete and a diaper-duty free day, flowers and cards and chocolate, birthday wishes via email and text, and just when I thought I couldn’t handle any more food, Whitni brought me a food magazine (genius!) so I could dream about baking and consuming more. I felt loved and happy and I’m pretty sure 25 is going to be a great year!

We LOVED General Conference this month. We spent a couple sessions at the Cloward’s apartment and discovered that Emery was so enthralled with new-to-her toys that we were actually able to glean a lot from watching. We also had a potluck lunch with the 6 other LDS families in our apartment complex between sessions (we’re hoping to make that a monthly tradition).

Watching conference

Halloween was so fun this year! Emery was a grumpy, tired mess for our ward Trunk-or-Treat, so we ended up leaving early (which was a bummer because the Primary did and awesome job putting it together and it looked SO fun!). Luckily, trick-or-treating, a week later, was a much better experience. When we were getting ready to go, Emery saw her butterfly costume from last year hanging in her closet and exclaimed “Ohhh! I’d be SO pretty in that!” I agreed (naturally), so we got another year’s wear out of it. We did some last minute face painting that made the costume a little more fun, and I even got Cam a little monster costume (He had already worn his football outfit twice and I was ready for something new). Pete made a comment about how both our kids looked like blobs, but I think they were adorable!

Emery decided to use her butterfly net as a candy bucket

She loved her face paint! She was telling her friends about it as we trick or treated and how she "be'd so still" for me to paint it.

Here's our crew of friend we met up with to trick-or-treat. So funny how all the toddlers except 1 are girls and all the babies in the strollers are their little brothers

After trick-or-treating at the "Waffle House," a house where they give you waffles along with the candy when you trick-or-treat.

Cam is the furthest thing from a monster there could be, but he sure made a cute one! He was perfectly content hanging out in the stroller for an hour and a half while the Big Sister trick-or-treated

The monster zonked on the car ride home

Pumpkin Carving with Emery was a blast! She made squishy little “pancakes” with the pumpkin guts and you can tell from the photos how much she enjoyed the sliminess and fun our one-toothed pumpkin provided.

One date night, we left Emery at her friend's house and went to our favorite Mexican Restaurant in Duluth, Taqueria El Dorado. The plan was to meet the Stahelis and Partridges there, but we ended up getting there a little sooner and bedtime for the Cam-man was fast approaching, so, well, we just dug in without them. I’m glad I finally documented this restaurant because it is so good! It’s about a 40 minute drive in traffic, but worth it. Even more than we love this restaurant, we love these friends:

P's on the left, Staheli's on the right

The football babies. Cameron and Davis are 5 months apart and destined to be buddies.