Sunday

Fall Affairs

Pumpkin Carving




Pumpkin Posing:


Pumpkin Lighting:



We went to my dad's house this weekend...and came home with these:


Those are all Lakin's. He probably has over 200 he collected.

Cale collected over 300 sprouted acorns. He wants to plant all of them...though I am not sure where he plans on doing that.


And our lemon tree is covered with blossoms. They smell wonderful, and we are hoping to get at least a couple lemons this first year.

Saturday

Bones


This week we dissected owl pellets.


This is one thing I really enjoyed doing when I was in school. I think I was in the 7th grade. I absolutely loved piecing all the bones together and figuring out which animal they belonged to.


And I think they all enjoyed the experience as well.


Lakin pulled out every rib bone he could find to show, but I think most everyone else found the skulls and jaws to be the most interesting.


Matching up the bones on the bone chart:


For links to more information visit The Forest Room


Tuesday

Volleyball


Learning to serve:



Learning the ways of passing:




Passing over the net:


Boys attempting to volley back and forth:



Girls volleying back and forth...

Friday

Life

I have been asked by a couple people if my lack of blogging is because of a new arrival. The answer- no, I've still got about 8 weeks left before my official due date of December 13th. As many mothers know the last weeks of pregnancy can be hard. Aches and pains, less energy and all that. Schooling is running on autopilot, with fun, hands on projects at a minimum. Hopefully in January that will pick up again. But we are still here. Living.

We've gone to the visit the Fire Station...


We had a great tour...


and they all had fun playing with the chief and his talking cookie jar...


We went to the Foothills Fall Festival (sorry, no pictures of that...) and the Shrine Circus.

We've never taken the boys to a circus of any kind, but we picked up free tickets at the TN Valley Fair last month so we took them. Their favorite part?


The parade at the beginning with all the little cars and such. Especially these little tractor trailers.


We were sitting right in front of this motorcycle and they waited the entire show for that part. It was 2nd to last so they had to wait a long time.


This has been a common sight in the drive way this week.


Bowling is the latest thing here, sparked from the Wii game they like to play. Every bottle in our recycling bin has been taken outside. The one pictured above is Lakin's version. The older ones make a lane down the driveway by lining it with bikes and cars and set the bottles up in true formation at the end.

We've spent a lot of time outside, the weather is beautiful. The kids play, I read...


We got the goats leash trained and they spend their evenings and our outside time eating down the brush that was my flower garden. Their favorite being my butterfly bushes....


or playing and throwing their empty treat bowl...


We had art and music lessons with friends....I didn't take my camera that day, but here are the boys' finished projects.

Our art lesson was on drawing emotions. First they drew blank heads on their papers. The one by one we chose an emotion and acted them out discussing the changes in their eyes, mouths, eyebrows, etc. Then they drew their faces to match their own expressions.

Cohen's

Cale's


Rylan's

And that's been life for the past 2 weeks.

Saturday

Weekend

Friday


Pellissippi State's Hot Air Balloon Festival


Lots of music, glowing balloons and traffic...


Saturday


A day at home


Beautiful weather


Lots of sun


and lots of goat attention


These girls are going to be BIG