October Happenings

October has quickly become one of my favorite months. Even though it is STILL so hot here for most of October, the evenings are usually nice, it's the beginning of a slew of holidays, and the fact that I've made it through the summer makes me happy. Haha! Plus, it's my favorite person's birthday, so there's that too.

Started off the month by taking a couple cute pics of Kate and Joshua -

As soon as our neighbors start putting out their Halloween decorations, we start taking nightly walks to go see them. It's one of my favorite October traditions. Everyone loves it. The kids often asked to take pictures with the decorations. Ha!

Michael's birthday was on a Saturday this year. We started off the day with a few presents, though his helpers opened all of them for him. :-)

And then we were off to the Arizona State Fair! It is so overpriced and ghetto, but I've learned that going on a Saturday morning is the best route since it's cheap admission and not super crowded. I've also learned about the free activities and how to even get on a couple rides for free. Even still, we end up feeling robbed just for buying a few things to eat. :-) Worth it though! I love greasy fair food! Anyway, Kathy was in town so she came with us this year. It was fun to have Grandma join in the fun! We started off at the petting zoo - a favorite for the kids.

Well, maybe not Josh's favorite. Haha! He warmed up to it eventually!

The kids rode a few rides....

 And we bought some food, including a turkey leg and a funnel cake. YUM.

This year they had a special dinosaur exhibit. The kids loved it - especially Matthew.

Michael requested chocolate chip cookies as his "birthday cake." Love him! He works so hard for our family and makes such an effort to have a great relationship with me and each of the kids. I am glad we had a reason to celebrate him all day.

A week or so later we went to Vertuccio Farms, our local pumpkin patch. We went last year with Matthew's preschool and I definitely wanted to go again. It was SO FUN. They have so many fun things to do and it was pretty reasonably priced because we went on a day that was discounted. I was surprised that it wasn't even that crowded that day!

One morning towards the end of the month Matthew colored a bunch of flowers, cut them out, and handed them to me in a bundle and asked if we could go on a date. He's the cutest! As soon as Michael got home that evening me and Matthew went to Cafe Rio for dinner and then out for donuts. Lots of good food and the best company. One-on-one dates with my kids have always been one of my favorite things.

And as Halloween drew closer, we carved a pumpkin. I've come to realize that I'm pretty excited about my kids one day being able to carve pumpkins by themselves. Haha! It's maybe not my favorite thing to do, (and I'm so bad at carving a face!) but totally worth it to see how excited they get about it.

Yay October!

LA trip

So this is my last year at home with all of my kids not in school. Sometimes it feels like SO much, constantly. And sometimes it is. :-) But there are several major perks to not having my kids in school yet, and I'm trying to capitalize on all of them while I can! One of the biggest perks is that I could go visit my parents at the beach in September for a week without having to worry about missing school. I don't know why I haven't done this in the past! ;-)

Since Michael has that little thing called a normal job, he couldn't just miss a week of work on such short notice, so he was going to fly to LA on Friday and drive us all back home on Sunday.... which meant that I'd be driving by myself to LA with the kids. Totally possible, but not exactly something I was looking forward to. ;-) My dad was SO NICE and offered to fly into Phoenix early Monday morning and drive down with me and the kids. This was a huge lifesaver and made my life SO MUCH easier. It was so nice to be able to give him the keys and leave the driving to him so I could just focus on the kids. Actually, Matthew and Kate have gotten to the age that they're really not a problem on road trips, especially since we have a DVD player in the car.... but Joshua is still a handful. Ha! During this trip he was 18 months old and ALMOST to the point of being able to watch movies in the car for entertainment.... but wasn't QUITE there.

heading out to pick up Papa from the airport and then off to CA!

We made it to LA that evening and were so happy to be there! It was still 100 degrees in Phoenix and we were SO over it so Grandma and Papa's felt like heaven. Also, Grandma filled her candy jars and the kids were pleased as punch. Joshua quickly figured out how to climb up there so we had the move the bench away from the piano for the rest of our visit. Haha!

The week was so so good. We started off by going to the Redondo Beach pier to get Kate a toe ring from our favorite toe ring store. She loved it and looked SO cute getting it on. I got one too.

Then we walked around the pier for a bit and got ice cream cones.

We also went to the aquarium at the Manhattan Beach pier. 

The next few days were filled with fun. We were always at the park or the beach or just outside on the slide or looking for Sweetie, the neighborhood cat. (And friendliest cat ever.)

coolest park and slide ever! 

Kate finally warmed up to the ocean on this trip! Matthew had warmed up to it over the summer but Kate hadn't quite gotten there so I was so glad to see her enjoying the water this trip!

We were spoiled rotten! Grandma even had a few crafts for the kids.

One morning we went to Polliwog park to play and feed the ducks and as soon as I stepped back to take a picture of the kids feeding the ducks, Joshua decided to step into the pond. Agh!!! Mom fail!!! I got him super duper fast and his head didn't even go under but EW. Nastiest water ever. I felt so bad. Soooo that's why he's basically naked in these pics. :-/

Friday morning we went to the Santa Monica Pier. I can't believe it was my first time ever being there!!! What kind of local was I??? Ha. I bought Matthew and Kate a pass so they could have unlimited kids rides and definitely got my money's worth. They loved all the rides and basically walked onto all of them. So fun!

Michael got in late Friday night and we were so happy to have him join us. He went to the beach with us on Saturday and then he and I went out Saturday night to The Kettle for soup and a bran muffin and for a walk on the pier. So fun.

SUCH a fun trip! So glad we went!!!

Slide Rock and HFMD

So for most people, Labor Day means it's almost the end of summer, but for us, we're still in the thick of it. :-) The weekend before Labor Day we wanted to escape the heat and had an entire Saturday totally free, so I started asking around for a good idea for a quick one day getaway. We decided to go to Slide Rock near Sedona. It's place where a stream (small river???) runs down these insanely slippery rocks so people slide down it like a slide. It is completely slick and doesn't feel like you're sliding down a rock at all. As a matter of fact, if you try to walk on it you'll most likely fall if you don't have water shoes on.... and even then you're pretty likely to fall. ;-) The only problem was that the water was painfully cold. I did the slide because Michael convinced me that going all that way and not even doing the slide would be super lame, but yikes. The bitterly cold water completely distracted me from the slide and all I remember about it was being shocked by how cold it was. Haha! Okay maybe I'm a wuss but it really was so so cold. ;-)

Also, Matthew wanted to walk into the water up to his ankles despite me warning him not to... of course he immediately slipped (even with water shoes on!) and started to go with the flow of the river. He can swim, but I was going to have to go after him since he's not a strong enough swimmer to get himself out of a moving river. (Even though he slipped into a veeery slow moving part of the river.)  Michael was off with Kate and I had Joshua and I was quickly trying to figure out my best course of action (probably to speed walk down the river a bit and grab him from the dry ground) but luckily there were a couple girls who were right next to where he was so I just asked them to grab him really quick and they were happy to help. Poor Matthew was pretty traumatized for a minute (brrr!) but he was totally fine. And Michael was off with Kate because before any of us had even tried going down the slide, Michael was going to take Kate down it on his lap. Haha! It actually would've been totally fine but the cold really shocked her once she was shoulder-deep and she flipped out. They only made it part of the way down because Kate was crying. I'm proud of her for trying though!!

Overall it was fun, and SO beautiful, but we probably won't go back until the kids are older and can go down the slide by themselves. I do want to go back to Sedona soon though. I'm sure there's so much more beauty to explore!

 Slide Rock (the actual slide was up further - this was more of a wading area... though why anyone would want to wade in that frigid water is beyond me)  ;-)

You can kinda see the slide behind Kate in this picture-

Beautiful Sedona

We stopped at Dairy Queen on our way home and the kids were very excited to get ice cream!

The following weekend was Labor Day and my sweet friend had invited our family up to her family's cabin for the weekend (fun!) but we ended up having to cancel the trip because a couple days before we were going to leave Josh started having red dots appear around his mouth. At first I barely even thought about it but then he woke up looking like this:

He didn't have a rash or spots anywhere else on his body but I knew I should probably take him to the doctor and the doctor told me it was Hand Foot and Mouth Disease. Nooooo! From here, Joshua only got worse. His mouth looked AWFUL and he also got spots all over his body, especially his hands and feet.

He did have a bit of a fever, but honestly he never seemed very miserable at all! The doctor warned me that the other kids would likely get it (it's super contagious!) and sure enough, a few days later Kate came down with it too. :-( She had it a little bit on her face, but she got it BAD on her arms and hands. The doctor told me that kids who get it bad on their hands often lose their fingernails, and a few weeks later most of Kate's fingernails did indeed fall off. (Luckily it wasn't bad because by the time a fingernail came off, a new one had already grown in underneath. Still kinda creepy though!) Anyway, I'll spare you the super nasty pictures of Kate's peeling fingers and just show you these mild ones. Haha. (Her hands got so bad that they were totally covered in red bumps... this pic doesn't do it justice at all.) She felt kind of lousy-ish for a couple evenings in a row but she really didn't have that horrible of sick-symptoms either.

I really thought Matthew would avoid it but he was eventually the last one to get it. I might not have even noticed if I hadn't been looking for it because he only got the rash on the bottom of his feet. He complained once about a sore throat but other than that, it was pretty smooth sailing with him.

Sorry for the detailed description of our bout with HFMD. Haha. Overall it wasn't fun, but I am SO glad that my kids didn't get nearly as sick as a lot of kids do when they get it. I have heard horror stories of how sick kids can get when they have it so I definitely consider us lucky! A small fever and sore throat was the worst of it - it definitely LOOKED much worse than it was! Of course it also wasn't fun having to keep my kids quarantined for so long. At least we had a fun trip to CA after everyone was better! (All about that in the next post!)