The past two weeks...

Wow. Sorry. I went missing there, didn't I? ;) Here's a brief recap of what we've been up to:

Nathan's mom came to visit, and we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park...did a couple hikes we've done before and enjoyed. Though Micah decided to stage a protest partially along the trail (after the Alberta Falls hike and before the hike around Bear Lake), the other two were all smiles:

All in all, it was a lovely (albeit slightly warmer than would have been ideal) day, complete with ice cream in Estes Park after a late lunch. A couple days later, given the still summer like weather, we decided to celebrate fall with a front yard water fight:

I love the looks of concentration on Micah and Asher's faces as they prepare their attack on Noah...while Grandma Nancy and I watched from the safety of the sidelines. Noah, of course, had the advantage of size:

The rest of the week passed quickly. Coincidentally, it was our week "off" from homeschooling (remember, we do three weeks "on" and then one week "off"), though we still had soccer practices and karate. On Friday (10/1), we found ourselves at Anderson Farms. We'd waited as long as we could in hopes of cooler weather and actually managed to go on a day in the 70s, but it was still rather hot amid the corn field without shade. ;) Even carrying our own water and wearing shorts and tees, this was a most welcome sight:

 
Yup. That's us finally leaving the corn maze. ;) Whew.

(For the record, we did this corn maze last year also. It's really rather amazing in scope. Check out pictures here. We opted only to do the eagle portion of the maze (with the FSI mystery) this year and still took about 1.5 hours, having only gotten really lost at the beginning while we sorted ourselves out, lol. Incidentally, what's with the weather? Last year, at almost this exact same time, we went to Anderson Farms in jackets and between snow days. Weird.) 

After the corn maze, we took a ride to the pumpkin patch, stopping to feed some odd looking long-horn cows on the way:

They had really long tongues and came right up to the trailer (unlike the buffalo who just stared at us). We were fortunate to have the trailer all to ourselves, so this was pretty cool. We continued on to the pumpkin patch:

The boys each picked a pumpkin, and then we took advantage of some of the farm's other offerings...such as seeing baby goats that had been born an hour before we got there, pretending to milk a cow, riding the pedal cars and seeing the baby calves who were born on Monday:

Fun day! :)

The next day, sadly, Grandma Nancy had to fly home. :( After she left, we had soccer games, the older two attended a birthday party for a friend and then we all resumed "normal" life.  Boys went back to the routine and that's kept us busy since. 

Oh. And two other things last week (after Grandma Nancy left and before today). We had the exterior of the house painted. Here's what it looked like before:

(Note the discoloration above the garage there. There was also peeling in the back, and apparently the previous owners had hired a painting crew that only put on one coat of paint (the previous owners weren't thrilled with the job at all according to our neighbor). So, we decided it was time to do something about it before winter set in and possible further damage occurred.) Here's the after:

The boys were pretty disappointed initially that we opted to go with another green, as they were lobbying heavily for blue. (We'd gone through the process of getting a couple different options approved by our home owner's association a month ago.) When we tried the blue sample on the house, though, it was just a little too bright for us. The boys have mostly come around now. :)

And the other thing, and the final thing for this post that's already too long, was that Asher and Micah had their first "official" karate pictures taken:

Aren't they freakin' adorable?! (These were taken by Eathan's Photography at the Karate West studio but I bought the copyright and images on CD.) There are a bunch of other shots, too, but I'll bring this post to a close for now. :) How's your October going?

Comments

[Jenny Knight]

Love the karate pictures. They are getting so big and they look so tough except for the fact that they are smiling:)

[nan]

I like the green!