Days Gone By

My favorite fall month is almost over. The weather is perfect, our pace of life is just right, and the holidays are getting closer. Right now the east coast is bracing for a super storm, but out here it's just another day in paradise. :)

Braylen and Daddy made an awesome landform project, don't you think?
Can you see the blur in the background? It's Kaleb!

The kids have been making me laugh all month long. Much of this laughter centers around a certain pumpkin that one of my little sweeties picked out. Grandma takes them out for pumpkins and cookies every fall, and can you believe what one of my sons brought home?

I have a friend who speaks in puns, and she asked me if we found this pumpkin in the "rear" of the store. She also said people must "crack up" when they drive by our house. :) Around here we refer to this as the butt pumpkin, and decided not to carve a face into it. Use your imagination to come up with some of the other things our boys would like to do with this pumpkin...

Aaron is super happy with his pumpkin. Thanks Grandma!
He calls it the third biggest pumpkin in our state. :)

Other ways my kids have made me laugh this month:
A conversation out of the blue between Aaron (at the sink) and Kaleb (in the shower.)
Aaron: "Look at the bright side, Kaleb. You're not ugly, and you have a nice brother--one nice brother."
Kaleb: "No, I have two nice brothers!"

With just Aaron in the car with me one day, we pulled up to a stoplight and this is what I hear from him: "The most beautiful curve on a woman's body is her smile." After a second of panic at the beginning of his sentence, I realize he's reading a billboard message that is behind me. :)

How can I not love living this life I've been given to live?! :)

Let's see...what else have we been doing this month? One night we had someone pound on our door at 2:30am. Then the doorbell began to ring. Braylen looked out his window, felt relieved to see a police car in the driveway, and went back to bed. (Most people would not feel relieved at that sight.) Turns out Derek was called out in the middle of the night and this was the PD's way of reaching him. I didn't even wake up until Derek turned the lights on. The life of a law enforcement officer and his family...

We've been checking Derek's trail camera every Saturday, and setting up tree stands for deer season. One thing I love about this is picking up lunch on our way home. What a treat. Saturday lunches are much more fun when I don't have to fix them. :) Derek took Kaleb and Aaron turkey hunting, while Braylen's been pheasant hunting with a friend and also with his uncle. He brought home a chucker and it was just enough meat for his supper one night. Derek and the rest of the guys in our family spent one afternoon chopping firewood. We won't need to gather firewood again for a long, long time.

The fun with firewood continued at our house the day after gathering it in the field.

Since we love pumpkins so much, we visited a pumpkin patch one Sunday. I'm sure my younger two boys would have loved a traditional patch with a slide and a corn box. But we decided to save money and time and visit a patch with just pumpkins this year. It was free, we had fun, and we came home with lots of pumpkins.

Aaron's always loved little pumpkins!

Braylen

Porch pumpkins

More porch pumpkins and Aaron of course!

And this post has gone on long enough! Happy October! :)

Fall Break

What a treat for me to spend a few days in Omaha with my parents. I'm sure they met up with us to see my boys, but I like to think they wanted to see me too. :) We stayed in a 2 bedroom suite so we were never apart--what fun times we had! Derek needed to work, so we missed having him along. But he had Ginger to take care of him, haha!

I'm pretty sure the kids in Omaha were not on fall break while we were there. The zoo was not crowded. The Amazing Pizza Machine was empty. We had no line and no waiting at Fuddrucker's. At times the breakfast room at our hotel was crowded, but that's about it! We played Scrabble, all the kids watched a lot of tv, Dad went swimming with the boys, and Mom and I went shopping by ourselves one morning. We stayed up late, popped popcorn, and watched a movie. I loved every minute of our time together.

Braylen had fun showing Grampy his pictures on his laptop.
Those two and their computer time...

At the zoo, Kaleb and Aaron trying in vain to stop the globe from spinning.

Mom, me, and cactus plants.
Those who know us well know why this is special. :)

Kaleb with a baby giraffe and her mother. Baby is 6 months old.

Aaron

We enjoyed the butterfly pavillion (one of Aaron's requests) and I walked
with blinders on through the insect pavillion!

After taking this picture, the tunnel cleared out and we had it all to ourselves.

Tired Aaron gets a free ride from Braylen. A fun day at the zoo always ends with tired feet!

Our second full day together didn't include as much walking as our zoo day, but we still walked a lot. One impromptu stop we made was at the pedestrian bridge spanning the Missouri river. It was a beautiful day for it, and the boys thought it was cool to be in two states at once. Of course they also enjoyed spitting over the edge of the bridge into the water. Boys.

Aaron and Grampy at the Pizza Machine

Kaleb and Braylen ready to race Grampy!

All smiles :)

The pizza machine is more than go-karts, but the go-karts are the best part!

The bridge from the Nebraska side

Half in Iowa, half in Nebraska! Aaron and Kaleb kept saying Idaho instead of Iowa.
You'd think they would know plenty about Iowa by now, silly boys!

The bridge from the Iowa side

Thank you Mom and Dad, for this memorable getaway!!! You bless us in so many ways, and we are so very thankful. :) We love you more than words can say!

His First Game

Aaron watched both of his brothers turn 8 and celebrate by going to their first college football games. I bet he thought his turn would never come. :) Yet the day did arrive--Aaron's first game! He and his cousin, both 8 years old, attended their first football game with Grandpa. Grandma was supposed to go to the game, but illness interfered. Grandma's loss became Kaleb's gain, as he went in her place. What a delight for Kaleb! (Sorry Grandma!) My SIL and I also got to go. What a funny group we were--3 kids, 2 moms, and 1 grandpa! The weather was beautiful, the game was a huge blow-out in our team's favor, and Aaron loved it all.

On our way!

Here are some pre-game shots:

Arriving at the stadium

A picture with Mom :)

LUNCH!

Our seats were way, way up. Like, almost at the very top row. But I was impressed at how well we could see the field. I just don't think there's a bad seat in this stadium. It was very bright and sunny, as you can tell from my pictures. And sometimes we were pretty hot and thirsty. It's hard to get a bottle of water at the top of the stadium! But at least we weren't cold, right?!

panoramic picture

Aaron even had his name on the scoreboard--our other boys never had that--ha! :)

Ready for the game to start!

My sister-in-law got some great pictures of the action on the field. She was nice enough to share them with me! :)

Pumped up and ready to play!

A hand off to Burkhead, one of our favorite players.

Our favorite kicker! We used to watch him play every Friday night.

During the game I took a few pictures of Aaron and Grandpa. My favorite one is of them holding hands.

How sweet :)

At Braylen's first game, Derek bought him a hat. I thought that would be a neat thing to do for Aaron, since his hat was kind of small for him. Kaleb wanted one too, and he found one on the $10 table. Okay! I like to say yes, right?! :)

Some people might think a final score of 73-7 means it was a boring game to attend. Hardly! Since Aaron is our most competitive son, it was a relief for our team to win big. And since our team lost at Kaleb's first game, this big win meant so much to us. :)

After the game, Aaron was one tired boy!
(See his new hat?)

As we left the stadium among the sea of red, I took one last picture of Grandpa and Aaron. What a gift to attend this game together. I know Aaron will always remember it. :)

Is There Any Football On Today?

Aaron asks me this question just about every day. We will be driving home from school and he'll ask, "Is there any football on today?" On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I have to say no. On Mondays and Thursdays I have to be honest and say, "Yes, but we can't watch it because we don't have cable." But I get to say YES on Fridays for high school football, on Saturdays for college football, and on Sundays for the NFL. :) I love to say yes!

He's watching football today, and being silly!

***This blog post is all about the random silly things our boys are doing right now. I apologize in advance for the toilet humor. But in my defense, this IS a blog about raising BOYS!!!***

One day we were driving somewhere and I heard one boy in the backseat say, "What if your first name was Poopy and your last name was Pants?" (insert roaring laughter among the brothers here!) Use your imagination to come up with some other combinations along those lines...

Aaron and his little cousin, who sometimes has poopy pants!
I promise I did not let him play the drums on his tummy.
And can you see his bandaid? :)

One son of ours is studying poetry in school. He made up a poem at home and said it over and over and over to himself. When I asked him if he was going to write it down and read it for his teacher, he looked at me like I had lost my mind. Here is his poem: "Buttcheek 1 and Buttcheek 2, everyone has one--so do you!"

Another son is perfecting his literary skills through the use of alliteration. Here are some of his latest masterpieces:
Freeda Fish farts frequently.
Billy Baboon beats bad buttcheeks.
Timmy Toucan tells twinkle toes to twinkle.

A while back as we drove past the cemetery, Kaleb asked me why there was a port-a-potty in an amphitheater. What? I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I saw the new kiosk beneath a gazebo where someone can look up the location of a specific grave site. I am glad we cleared that one up. No dropping your drawers at the entrance to the cemetery! :)

Moving on to non-potty-talks...

Most days when I pick the boys up from school they tell me, "School was fine." That's all I get. But one day (September 21st) Aaron walked out of school and said, "Today is one of the best days of my life! I can't even tell you every single reason why it's a great day--there's so many!" Here are some of his reasons:

• His good behavior ticket was picked out of the jar in his classroom, earning him a prize.
• He got a new book from the book fair. (Thanks Grandma & Grandpa!)
• We were planning to attend the high school football game that night.
• The next day he was going to his first college football game!
• He bought a snack from the snack sale and it was cheese dip with cracker sticks.

What a great example of how an ordinary day and become so much more than ordinary!

Aaron with his cheese sticks snack (and some sausage on the side!)

Kaleb and Aaron gave me some funnies last month at their great-grandma's funeral. We were at a Lutheran church, which is an unfamiliar experience for our boys. When the pastor walked in wearing a white robe tied with a belt around the waist, Kaleb said, "Is he going to do karate?"

During the responsive reading part of the service, Aaron put his right hand over his heart like we were saying the pledge of allegiance. It was so cute we just let him keep his hand there. :)

My 3 Stooges playing flag football :)

Kaleb loves candy corn and I can't keep enough in the house to feed his appetite. Today he told me he had a dream last night about candy corn. How strange! Maybe I can make him a candy corn birthday cake next month?

And that's all I have for today!