Apple Jacks & Missing Teeth (Oct 19-24)

We had a fun weekend over MEA break.
Daddy took us to a park and took some pictures while we enjoyed the fall colors.
We also got to play in the park for a little while.

We also spent quite a bit of time cleaning our house & our rooms. The Divas, studs and all their kids came over to play at our place. It was a fun party! Then, Mommy took Hannah to her tournament then next day for a fun day of playing with the Diva kids. Noah spent the day with daddy at Noah's best friend's house while Daddy helped cut logs for firewood.

Cleaning the house meant we also had to clean up all the leaves in the yard:

We helped clean up the leaves in the front yard, but got to play in them a little bit, too.

We also had to have our annual trip to the Apple Orchard. We love our trips to Apple Jacks!

There's a couple of trees that we have our picture in EVERY YEAR:

A lot of people were taking pictures. Mommy likes to take a lot of pictures there, too. It's a beautiful place, but a fun place to play.

Hannah took her turn on the jumping pillow while Noah enjoyed the corn maze.

The annual ride in the cow train

The annual ride on the cow train

bouncing on the jumping pillow

Noah and Mom making their way through the corn maze

Giant pumpkin!

Noah went through MEA weekend with two very loose teeth, but his goal was to lose them at school. If you lose your teeth at school, you get to bring them home in a cool treasure box. So, he held onto the teeth...

 Noah lost his FIRST TOOTH on October 23rd.
Then, he turned around and lost his SECOND TOOTH in the same afternoon. Two teeth.

Noah kept it a secret from mom until after school and after parent teacher conferences. (Which, went very well. Both kids are doing exceptionally well in school and the teachers are very pleased with their performances.)

So, the tooth fairy came. And, she settled a very long standing debate: Does the tooth fairy give BOYS glittery money?

Two teeth, lost in 1 day. Tooth fairy did NOT give him glittery money.

The answer: NO. They just get regular money.

So we have two kids missing two teeth.
"All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth..."

Though, one is growing in for each of them. Noah had an adult tooth growing in before he even lost one of his baby teeth!

October 1-14

No, we HAVEN'T fallen off the face of the earth. But, life just gets so busy that blogging falls off of mom's "to do" list.
However, since our www.stephenandshari.com page has been having some issues, we'll try posting photos to our blog to kind of fill you in on the latest in our lives:

We saw the coolest rainbow we've ever seen! October 2nd

As the weather gets colder, we've enjoyed some nice warm fires (and some s'mores) in our fireplace.

We both enjoyed a season of soccer. For the first time, we played on different teams! We missed each other, but it was fun to play on teams and make our own friends.

Hannah lost her first top tooth before soccer picture day, and her second tooth AFTER soccer pictures. Good thing sweet corn season is over! Too bad apple season isn't...

Hannah loved to play defense on her soccer team, though she did a pretty good job of dribbling the ball downfield & scored a couple of times. Coincidentally, Hannah & Noah each scored a goal on the SAME DAY about 5 minutes apart from each other!

Just kids being silly...in a box.

Thanks Great Grandma for the Bingo Game. We found it in her things when we went through her games & puzzles last year, and the kids LOVE to play Bingo.

Noah started a challenging puzzle (found in Great Grandma's things) that challenged the whole family.

Fun with jellybeans

Fun with jellybeans

Do you like Pizza?

As we were moving into our new home, Stephen found a photo album that I'd sent him while he was in Iraq. It contained several photos of him with me and with his new puppy before he left for Iraq and more photos taken while he was home in Minnesota on his 2-week break.
He showed Hannah the album of photos, telling her "this is Cheyenne when she was a puppy and daddy when I was in the Army. Didn't I look different?"
Hannah looked at him (now about 80 lb heavier than when he served in the Army) and said "And, then you ate pizza?"

Too many weddings

Stephen mentioned that he saw Hannah dumping a garbage bag of stuffed animals on the floor of Noah's room this morning when he got up.

A few hours later, I was in Noah's room, helping him clean up his floor:

mom: Noah, you didn't make your bed this morning. Why not?

Noah: that's because there were too many weddings going on in my bed.

Mom: Too many weddings?

I now notice the bed is covered in his and Hannah's stuffed animals. Then, I notice that the animals are paired up: Hannah's small pink bunny is laying next to Noah's small pink bunny. Hannah's pillow pet was next to Noah's pillow pet on the floor. Hannah's Stuffie was next to Noah's Stuffie. Each gift they'd gotten when the other got a "coordinating" stuffed animal was with it's counterpart.

Epiphany

Today in church, our pastor spoke about how the wise men's role in the story of Jesus, how Herod sent them to seek Jesus and how they had a dream to return to their own country by a different road because of King Herod. During the entire sermon, Hannah & Noah sat in the back of the church at the children's table coloring and reading.

While I gave him a bath, Noah told me all about how the wise men came to see Jesus. He told me that King Herod was very mad that Jesus was born and wanted to kill baby Jesus. He said that  Joseph had a dream that he should take his family to Egypt, but it would be OK. His family would be safe.

I asked him if he'd listened to Pastor Kristen during church. He told me "I couldn't understand Pastor Kristen. I mean, I CAN understand her, but I can't understand her when I'm in the back of the church. I read it in the beginner's bible."

Isn't it funny that he read about the story of Epiphany when that was the story the pastor spoke about?

June & July

We loved the hotel we got to wake up at on the first day of June. We LOVED getting to swim in the pool. Hannah really made progress in learning to swim and her love of the water. We got up and had a wonderful breakfast of fruit, waffles, toast, juice. It was great! We want to go back to La Quinta again soon! We got to play at the mall and have our hair cut before heading to our friends Monica & Paul's wedding. All of the Divas (mommy's volleyball team) were there. It was fun, though we had to leave early to get home and get to bed.

When we got home, our house smelled terrible! The guys who refinished our floors made them very pretty, but it made our whole house smell bad. We slept upstairs again for a few days. It smelled bad, but not as bad upstairs as it did downstairs.

Another highlight was our last day of school. We've LOVED kindergarten, but now we're ready for summer and then FIRST GRADE! Wow. Mom and Dad can hardly believe that we're going to be first graders.

We got to have a graduation ceremony where Mom & Dad and Grandma & Grandpa came. We wore graduation hats that we made and graduation gowns and got little certificates. After graduation, we went to Dairy Queen to celebrate.

We got good grades all year in school, too. As a reward, Mom & Dad bought us tennis rackets to congratulate us on our hard work.

Mom and Dad kept busy with all they had to get done on the house. We packed a lot of toys, which was disappointing. We'll be so excited to move to a new house and get our toys out of storage!

We were excited to be able to spend the summer at our old daycare again. All our friends are still there - Noah missed not seeing his best friend every day since we went to different schools. And, Hannah says he is her boyfriend. Noah & Hannah both say that Hannah is going to marry Grayson and live next door to Noah when they grow up.

We loved basketball over the winter, so we asked Mom & Dad to sign us up for Hoopstars again. Mr. Basketball is a great coach! This was a smaller group of basketball players, but we really loved getting more attention on our basketball skills.

The week of the fourth of July, our daycare was closed, so we got to go to Grandma & Grandpa's house. It was a fun week! We finally got to hang out with Cheyenne. We've missed her so much since she's been at Grandma & Grandpas. We hung out with Grandma & Grandpa in Madison for a few days, then went to the lake cabin and hung out there. Hannah really enjoyed getting to swim in the lake. Angie taught Noah how to do Sodoku puzzles, so he only wanted to hang out in the house and do puzzle books. We did get him outside to enjoy the lake, though his idea of being outside involved sitting in the shade by the lake doing puzzles.

Despite him telling us that he's an "indoor kid", we did get Noah out on the boat and in the water to have some fun.

While we were at Grandma & Grandpa's for the week, Mommy worked on packing up the house. She moved a lot of boxes to the storage trailer! Daddy was on a mission trip with the church in West Virginia.

We were very excited to welcome Daddy back from his trip to West Virginia! We met him at the church, gave him big hugs and let him know how much we missed him.

We got to enjoy the city pool in July. We love our pool! Noah still likes to hang out in the zero-depth kids area of the pool, but Hannah dared to go into the bigger pool (as long as Mom & Dad were with her.)

We were excited to get to go to Mommy's work picnic. Daddy picked us up and brought us downtown. There was food, golf, a dunk tank (Noah really wanted to do the dunk tank but he saw it too late - he saw it when he was walking out to go home.) We got to watch Mommy win a volleyball tournament against other Lifetouch players. (yay, mommy!) We also got to see a REAL Nascar car, play air hockey and play a little bit of volleyball with Mommy. It was fun!

We also started a new session of tennis. We LOVED our tennis class that we took in April. We love the sport and our coach was awesome! We were hoping that the same coach would be our coach again this time, but we weren't so lucky. There were too many kids in the class, and the coach wasn't very good at working with kids. We still like tennis, but we think a different coach would make it more fun.


Hannah got to go to a Twins game. The neighbors had 2 extra tickets to the Twins game in the TENTH ROW! Hannah went with Mom; Noah was happy to stay home and do puzzles. It was such a fun game! We were really close to Joe Mauer, and Hannah enjoyed being at the game with Griff.

After the game, Daddy picked us up at the field and brought us to a special building where we could watch FIREWORKS. They were REALLY awesome fireworks over the Mississippi river. Daddy brought us popcorn and we ate popcorn while we watched fireworks.

We also got to meet up with Daddy's uncle and cousin and her kids to go bowling one night. We had pizza and bowled with our friends. It was a fun night!

We had our cousins, Lauren & Ben at our house AGAIN this year. That's twice this year! It was a fun weekend since it was also Frolics weekend. We didn't get to see fireworks since we saw them the weekend before, but we loved hanging out with our cousins. We got to go to the firehouse and have waffles on Sunday before we checked out all the fire trucks. We found out Grandpa Mark used to be a fireman, so he showed us around the trucks a little bit.

We'd better run, but we'll try to fill you in about August & September soon! It's crazy how time flies when you are six!

Noah & Hannah

Apple Orchard photos

I know I'm WAY behind on posting blog updates. I hope to catch up soon!
It's been a busy summer - getting our home ready to sell, soccer, tennis, starting first grade.

I had to share our annual trip to the apple orchard photos now, though.

We have updated our photos that we have taken for the past 6 years over MEA weekend in our favorite spot:

Happy Fall!