The first of the fall leaves

Every year, I have to take pictures of somebody jumping in the fall leaves. Now that I have a child, I think it's become even more fun. Last year, Zachary didn't understand what I was doing, but this year he jumped right in on his own! He thought raking the leaves was great fun, even though he thought it was even more fun to take leaves from the pile and spread them all over the sidewalk. :) Hopefully I'll be able to take more pictures later, but here's these for now!

Carving Pumpkins!

As most of you know, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and I especially enjoy carving pumpkins. :) This year we got a little pumpkin out of our garden, which was just Zachary's size! It was fun to involve him in the carving process, even though he didn't really understand what we were doing. Unfortunately, one of our pumpkins was moldy, so we only did two, but it was lots of fun!!

Zachary was interested in what we were doing

You want me to stick my hand in WHAT?!?

Daddy carving his masterpiece

Here's Zachary's pumpkin

And here's Neil's, which I helped to carve!

Pretty impressive!!!

Cornbelly's

A few weeks ago, we decided to take part in the festivities at Thanksgiving Point. We went with my Mom and Chaselyn and Travis, and it was lots of fun! There were a lot of things to do, and most of them Zachary could even do, which was nice. It was a beautiful day and reminded me how much I love Fall and Halloween. First we stopped off at the big bouncing pillows:

And then we the slides for a while, but they were all wet because of the morning dew.

Then we went for a ride on the cow train!

And of course we had to make a stop at the cars, Zachary's favorite....

Later we discovered the corn house, which was an interesting concept.

And we finished off with the tire swings!

Zachary was getting really tired by this point so Neil and I headed home. My mom and kids stayed and did the corn maze, but I didn't figure that would be something that would really interest Zachary so we skipped it this year. We had a great day, though, and we'll definitely have to do it another year!!

Working with Daddy

Ever since we moved into our house, we've been meaning to put a railing on the back steps. Zachary has fallen down them a number of times, and we finally got around to doing it! Neil went and bought some nice wood, and he made them all by himself. What a handy man I have!! To build the railings, Neil had to use all sorts of tools, so of course Zachary was in heaven. He "helped" his daddy all night, and was so proud of himself while he was done. :)

Here's one railing all finished!

hmmm, what does this tool do?

Neil got to use a hammerdrill to drill into the cement. What fun!

Hey look, I can do that too!

The Zoo!

I've been wanting to take Zachary to the zoo for a long time now, and I finally had the chance. He loves animals, and he knows the sounds that many of them make, so I knew that he would love it. My dad took us a couple of weeks ago, and we had a blast! At first, Zachary wasn't sure what was going on, but after we took him out of the stroller and he woke up a little, he couldn't get enough. His favorite animals were the giraffes, a statue of a tiger, and a little fox that kept running back and forth. :) If anything was just sitting there, it simply wasn't worth his time! Oh, but his absolute favorite thing was the train ride that we took at the end. For days afterward, he kept asking for the "choo-choo". Thanks for a great time Dad!

Looking at the elephants. The baby elephant was hilarious!!

Giraffes, apparently, say "raaarrr"

He didn't want to get off these tigers!

This is a slide that went really fast, and he loved it!

And his favorite part....the train ride :)