Frosty Mountains

This morning I woke up to beautifully frosted mountain tops outside my bedroom window. I'd slept better than I have in days, there was a cool, crisp, fallishness to the air, and I decided that all is right with the world. I love fall.

Yesterday we had another great Science Club at Wynter's house. The kids learned about apes and wolves. My kids liked the apes, but they were most excited about the wolves. They made wolf masks, and learned some cool new vocab words, and all about wolves and wolf packs. My kids ate it up. They were super attached to their masks (Del even wore hers in the car all the way home), so I thought it would be a good idea to laminate them when we got home so they'd last longer. My kids are rough on things. So we laminated the masks and cut them out again. Then they wanted to wear them and play wolf pack. Lincoln said he was a cave wolf, Ivan said he was a jumping wolf, and Adelia decided to be a tree wolf. Lincoln insisted that a tree wolf was a real kind of wolf. I'm not so sure. Anyways, they lined up in a line and decided who was the biggest (Lincoln) and he got to tell the other wolves what to do. This was great until Ivan and Adelia wanted a turn being the leader, and Lincoln wouldn't let them because he was the biggest wolf. I had to send him to time out once before he consented to let everyone have two-minute turns being the leader. They played that for awhile, and then they wanted to play Wolf Hide and Seek. Basically, like normal hide and seek, except when you find someone that's hiding you have to howl. There was a lot of howling going on at my house for the rest of the evening. But they loved it, and couldn't wait to tell Aaron everything they learned over dinner.

On Tuesday we did Art Class. The kids finished up their Happy Sun projects that they started last week. Basically, they took a large piece of white constructions paper, and used red and yellow paint to paint the whole thing, using swirly motions to blend the paint in places to make orange. It was cool looking. Then they cut circles and triangles out of their painting, and glued them into a sun shape on a piece of blue construction paper. Lincoln's are on top, Ivan's are on bottom.

We finally finished On the Banks of Plum Creek, our family read-aloud that we've been working on for awhile. They got kind of tired of it in the middle and we took a break from it for awhile, but then picked it back up again, and they really enjoyed the end. We are going to take a break from the Little House series for awhile. I just got our October read-aloud in the mail...

And I am so excited to read it, I almost can't stand it. Lincoln had been begging me to read him something spooky. So hopefully this fits the bill. I loved this book when I was a kid. And the boys have like the other Roald Dahl books we've read together (James and the Giant Peach, The Fantastic Mister Fox, and George's Marvelous Medicine) so I anticipate that they'll like this as well. I just hope it does't scare Ivan too much. I probably wouldn't have read it to Lincoln when we was only four, but I guess that's the benefit to being a younger sibling, you get to do a lot of things way earlier than the oldest child did.

I went in Adelia's room today (she was having quiet time) to tell her it was time to go pick up Lincoln from school. I found her like this, only with the blanket pulled all the way over her head. When I pulled the rest of the blanket off of her, I found toys. Tons of toys, all snuggled up to her and crammed underneath the blanket. Silly girl.

Speaking of silly, I put Oliver in his jumpy chair this afternoon while I made dinner, and when I went to pull him out, he looked at me like this...

Maybe he was hungry? I don't know, but I laughed. I can't believe this kid will be seven months old tomorrow. He's gotten into this annoying habit every since he got croup of waking up at three a.m. It's just about killing me. Luckily, Aaron has been very good to me the last couple of nights that I haven't felt well, and getting up with Ollie so I don't have to.

Lincoln had a soccer game tonight, and it was raining the whole time, but there was no lightening, so they didn't call the game. We decided that Aaron would stay home with all the other kids, while I took Linc to his game. It was freezing! But Lincoln probably played the best game he's ever played so far. He had a couple nice passes, one really good "shoelace kick" that sent the ball up and over the other team's heads, and he was a little bit more aggressive than usual. When it was his turn to sit out, he came over and sat on my lap so we could try to keep each other warm. I love my Lincoln Boy.

Linc has been really into drawing lately, which I love, especially since the things he draws are really starting to look like what he's trying to make them look like. Here are a couple of the latest masterpieces.