November notables...

The boys finished up soccer halfway through November.  I did another half marathon (2:11) - about 20 minutes faster than the one I did back in 2011.  We had a big week for Thanksgiving, which I'll document next.  Here are just a few other moments from November.

We never do very well on crazy hair day at school, but we attempted to style it a bit different.  Semi-crazy.  

 These two are cute.  You never know what to expect.   You might find them reading a book in a bucket, with underwear on their head, or wearing my bra (not pictured...).  Savannah still likes hats and shoes.  

The kids had off a couple days of school for Veteran's Day, so Alex took them hiking one of the mornings.  It was the dog's first hike, and the kids were excited to find a banana slug.  I enjoyed a few hours without the kids!

22 months

One more post for October:  

I made Savannah's plaid dress and matching doll dress out of one of my shirts that never fit right.  She likes it.  I like it.  Cute girl - especially when sleeping!

Halloween

Well, one good thing about a power outage - creating collages on my laptop was about all I could do in the dark.  So I have now caught up with October on my posts... here's Halloween.

We went to the annual Halloween party at a friend's house - great party.  New for this year was a spooky tunnel, which Nathan almost didn't do because he was scared!  He finally did.  I don't think Owen or Weston ever went through it.  The kids enjoyed the usual games, and we enjoyed a taco salad bar for dinner.

Here is the crew:  

I made Jared's shirt and light saber, little boot covers for Savannah's outfit, and put together Nathan's costume.  I didn't have to sew the pants, but did glue the red stripe down the sides.  I sewed the shirt and vest and made the belt out of craft foam.  

Luckily the other kids were happy with thrift store finds.  Weston was excited about his "Pirates of the Caribbean" costume because it satisfied 2 things he wanted to be - a pirate and a skeleton.  Skeleton pirate - perfect.  Owen specifically requested to be a muscular spiderman, so I was so glad to find that.  Whew.  Savannah was fine with her costume, because it had a dress, hat, and shoes (all things she loves.)  

Below is the aftermath of our trick-or-treating around the neighborhood.  Everyone was really generous, and the kids ended up with plenty of candy (for not much work).  The kids began going through their candy, weeding out their favorites and making a pile of discards.  Nathan discarded some, Owen discarded more, and Jared kept EVERYTHING!  Ha ha.  I'm not surprised.  

Weston ate ONE piece of candy (smarties) and then he was done.  He didn't want to go trick-or-treating at all.  We had to coerce him into it.  After every house, he asked, "Are we going home now?"  At one point, he even tried to say, "We need to get home and do our dinner chores."  Silly kid.  At least we got him to go and get some candy for Mom and Dad.  

   

I was particularly happy at this point, because this meant Halloween was done and I could move on to the next holiday... ;) 

Pumpkin patch kids

I took Weston and Savannah to the pumpkin patch on an outing for playgroup.  We did the tractor ride, looked at the animals, picked out a couple little pumpkins, and enjoyed a snack.  

We took all the kids back one evening.  The big kids really wanted to do the corn maze.  Weston and Savannah got another chance for the tractor ride.  

We let the kids carve Owen and Weston's little pumpkins.  We didn't get any big pumpkins this year.  Just these cute little ones.  

Owen had to take a picture with "Bono" the monkey, his buddy from school.  He was assigned to watch over him for a few days and take a couple pictures of Bono doing something with him.  

Best day ever...

The night of Halloween it rained pretty hard, but the soccer games were all still on the next day.  Weston and Savannah didn't waste any time in finding the best spot on the sidelines to spend their time.  Weston started out with those rainboots on, but had taken them off by the end of the game.  Sigh... they had a great time.  What can you do?  Just start taking pictures...

Green Flash, Tenacious Tigers, and Tsunami

Soccer season was from the beginning of September to mid-November.  Alex was the head coach of Owen's team, and I helped as assistant coach.  It sure seemed like a long season - we were counting down practices and games by mid-October... we had fun though.  This was Owen's first season to play, and he did pretty well.  He was the team's "best goalie," although they don't have goalies for this age.  He preferred to defend, although he did score a goal or two.  In fact, there was one game when all of his teammates scored a goal.  

The game that was most fun for the players was the one in the mud.  There was a big mud hole right in the middle of the field, so most of the boys were camped out in the mud.  A few of them didn't want to get dirty at all.  

After the last game, we had an end-of-season party.  The team got Alex a bobble-head coach trophy.  It even looks a bit like him, except for the mustache.  

Jared hadn't played soccer for a few years.  He has improved a lot since he was watching the birds in U-6 soccer.  He is much more aware of what's going on and more aggressive.  He had a really good coach, who helped the team make a lot of progress throughout the season.  His team didn't quite make the upper pool of play-offs (maybe 12 teams in that one?), but they got 2nd place in a lower pool of six. It turned out to their advantage, since they got a big trophy for 2nd place.  (I think only the 1st and 2nd places in the upper bracket got trophies, so if they got out before that, they didn't get anything.)   Jared and his team were pretty proud of those trophies (they thought they got 2nd place in the U-9 league).  I think Jared wants to play again next year, so at least he enjoyed it.  He got to play with several buddies from school, so that was a plus as well.

Nathan also had not played since 2011, but he never looked like he was behind in skills.  He was aggressive and played well.  He also had a good coach who knew where to play the boys and build on their strengths.  Nathan played mid-field most of the season.  The highlight of his season was scoring off a corner kick.  His coach was happy that someone finally put a body on one of the kicks and knocked it in.  We were all very proud of him.  His team had enough playing points to make the play-offs, but was disqualified from play-offs since the team (parents) didn't fulfill their referee assignments.  It is unfortunate that the kids were punished for something they had no control over.  And it wasn't all the parents fault either.  One of the designated referees was injured halfway through the season, and the soccer organization wouldn't allow a replacement.  Why...?  I don't know.  Strict rules.  Anyway, it was unfortunate because their team was really coming together by the end of the season.

It was fun to watch each of the boys play!  Here is Nathan's goal from the corner kick (I wish I hadn't turned off the camera so fast afterwards, because the celebration was amusing.)  It's a quick video...

Oh, and that was also the day that Nathan had made a bargain for screen time to play I-pad games, and we agreed to that if he made a goal.  I think he may have been more happy about that than actually scoring the goal to tie up the game.