The New House, Part 2

Here's a few pictures of the upstairs in our new house.

Here's Abby looking up from the entryway toward the "window" in the toy room wall. Abby's such a little lady...

This is the toy room looking toward the "window" that the last picture was taken from. The day bed is great for when people come to visit. The toys are always keep cleaned up and nicely put away : )

This is the outside wall in the toy room. The window has a lovely view over our neighbor's roof. But since his house is only 1 story, and there's no other houses in that direction for about a half mile, it's still pretty nice.

Halloween Pumpkins

For the Halloween party at Thomas and Abby's school, they were allowed to paint one pumpkin per family. Since the pumpkins were going to sit in the library for about a week, you would only paint, not cut the pumpkins and they were supposed to look like a character from a book. (Some people choose a character from a movie that was based on a book)

They wanted to paint the pumpkin to look like the characters from the Magic Treehouse series of books. Since we could only submit one pumpkin, and there's 2 characters, we painted a face on each side of the pumpkin.

This is the Annie side of the pumpkin

And here's Jack.

On Saturday we carved pumpkins for Halloween. Thomas really got into carving the pumpkin, but I was worried about what else he'd cut. He bent the blade on this little carver he was so in to it.

Molly really surprised us. She really liked "gutting" the pumpkin. Here she is, up to her elbow performing brain surgery on her patient.

She also used a scoop to clean out the insides. But she found it to be less satifysing then just reaching in and yanking.

Here's the happy Jack O'Lanterns that we set out. They are (l to r) Abby's, Thomas', Molly's

And here they are with candles.

"Mump...Mump"

When we moved to Texas, we bought a trampoline for the kids to play on. At first it was too hot and humid for them to use it, but as the weather cooled they spent more time jumping on it. At first Molly was scared of the trampoline, since the big kids would bounce her too high. But once school started, she learned that "mumping" on the trampoline was a lot of fun. At first she only used her "Power leg" to jump, so she couldn't get very high. But she loved "mumping" with us. Eventually she learned how to jump on her own. She will go out and run around the trampoline and jump for quite a while. She's really learned well and get a lot of air for such a little kid.

Here's her little footprints in the dew that settled on the trampoline one morning.

Houston Zoo

On Saturday we went to the Houston Zoo to celebrate Toby's birthday. The zoo was really nice, and since it was cloudy and October, temperatures were only in the high-70's, very nice for Houston.

Next to the zoo there was a park and a lake. You could rent paddle boats and cruise around the lake. There was also a large fountain in the center, and so the kids were posed in front of it. In this picutre, Abby is showing off what she learned at school this year.

Since we went to the zoo for Toby's birthday, we spent a lot of time at the kiddy zoo in the petting zoo. Ah, the fun of parent's birthdays. At the petting zoo, they just had goats. There was a big bucket of brushes that the kids could us to "pet" the goats. Of course each goat was surrounded by several kids wildly brushing any part of the goat that they could reach, and each clump of kids was surrounded by several parents wildly taking pictures.

Here, Thomas, Abby and Molly all brush a goat. Molly was unclear which direction she should brush the hair, but the goats are pretty patient.

Molly also found a favorite goat. She would brush the goat until she (the goat) got bored and wandered off. Molly didn't want "her" goat to get away, so she'd rest her arm on the goat's back and they'd walk around the yard until the goat chose to stop. Then Molly would start brushing again.

On this goat, Molly discovered a tail. Everytime she brushed or grabbed the tail, the goat would swish it back and forth. Molly thought it was the funniest thing ever. She could have done it for hours...but then a "mean" zoo worker (who's job was sweeping up poop) told her to stop grabbing their tails.

After the petting zoo, there was a prairie dog exhibit in the kid's zoo. Thomas and Abby and Molly climbed through a tunnel to pop up in the middle of the prairie dog habitat. Molly's a bit too short to see in this picture. I don't think she was as excited by the exhibit as the other two.

Years ago, we took Thomas to the Houston zoo. Since we called him our little monkey, when we saw this statue, we had to take a picture of him. Now, years later, we've got all three of our little monkeys in front of the statue



In getting ready for Halloween, the staff was hanging pumpkins in the trees. All three kids were told to stand under the pumpkins and make scary faces. This is what we got.

Pictures of the new house

Here's a few pictures part of our new house in Houston. We've finally settled in and have nearly all the boxes unpacked. Here's the living room. The door on the wall leads into our bedroom. The other three bedrooms are all upstairs, which is one of the best layouts we've ever seen. The only time it's a problem is when one of the kids is sick and we have to go up and down the stairs all night long taking care of them. That's why we put the day bed upstairs, then one of us (usually Amy) can sleep on it when that happens.

This is othe entry way into the house. The cut out section up near the ceiling leads to the upstairs toy room. The kids like the idea of being able to climb up on something and look out on to the first floor. They can just hide up there and see who's at the front door. At first we were worried that toys or sisters would "try to fly". But so far nothing like that has happened.

Another view of the entry way. This is under the toy room and right by the stairs. The tiles are great fun when the kids come home and their shoes are wet.

This our formal dining room. We put the table that Randy and Mitzi made for us (Amy) in this room. Everyone who sees it is really impressed, and a few have asked if Mitzi still does the stone work and how much it would cost...

This is our breakfast area. The table here is an IKEA special. It's solid pine and weighs about 5 lbs. The hamsters are in the back corner hidden by the table. We usually forget about them, until someone notices that their water bottles are empty. But so far they they've survived the kids "love" and they've survived the parents "neglect", so they're pretty tough creatures.

Here's our kitchen. It's smaller than what we had in OKC, but we really like it. We also have gas appliances for the first time in our lives, but we like them so far.

Eventually we'll post more pictures of the house, maybe after the "kids" clean up...

Amy's new haircut

This week Amy decided to get her hair cut. She's been tired of it being so long and hot, and she wanted to donate it to Locks of Love. Here's her hair before and after

Picnic

A few weeks ago, we went to a local park for a picnic and to play on the playground. There was a large "spiderweb" in the park, which the kids loved playing on.

Molly needed a lot of help to get up to the seat. But she sure loved the view. Abby climbed like a monkey, and her and Thomas raced each other to the top. After they played on the "spiderweb", they went over to the slides. Thomas and Abby chased each other up and down the slides. They slid down sitting, backward, sprawled out and on their stomachs. As you can see, the slide is made up of about a hundred little rollers, so they didn't like it so much on their stomachs. After they played for a while, we got ready to eat our picnic. But then the Texas weather got us. The clouds opened up and started pouring. We raced back to the van, and started driving east toward home. About 1/2 mile from the park, we out raced the storm and broke out into clear weather. We hurried home (about 3 miles east) and set up our picnic on the trampoline. We ate and hoped that we'd outrun the storm. We were nearly right...but the storm moved a bit faster than we'd thought.