neighbors, please retrieve your leaves

For a yard with no trees, we sure have a lot of leaves. Go figure.

Thank you, North Wind.

fall fun

The McFamily had a full weekend...here's just a sampling of the things we did.

Saturday was our Fabulous Fun Fall Cleanup Day- well, maybe it wasn't fabulous, and it really wasn't all that fun, but it is fall and we did clean up, so I guess that's half right. We set out early to clean the garage and get all of the summer gear stored before the snow flies (which incidentally was Sunday...good timing!). We managed to accumulate a lot of stuff since last spring, so it took Steve and I some creative rearranging to get things put away, all with the little mess makers underfoot. Projects seem to take twice as long when you've got that kind of help!

Sunday morning we brought the very cold pumpkins in off the front step and turned them into Jack-o-Lanterns. As you can probably tell from the pictures, O wasn't all that interested in digging the "guts" out, but J was more than happy to get in up to his armpits. The Pair-o-Jacks are currently sitting in the kitchen window so that they can stay warm, even though both kids seem to be a bit frightened of them!

We also made some Halloween cupcakes on Sunday...nothing like a little orange frosting to put a smile on your face!

pickin' apples

Last weekend, we took advantage of a beautiful day and took the kids to a local apple orchard. When we got there, there were signs posted explaining that the orchard had been the victim of a hail storm, but that there were still lots of good apples to be picked- some of them just had "dents". I wasn't really sure what to expect...I know what hail can do to a car, but hadn't ever thought about what would happen to a juicy piece of fruit during a good old fashioned hail storm. Now I know.

Now maybe this is normal for mid-October, and maybe it's the result of the hail storm, but there were TONS of apples on the ground, and most of the apples still clinging to the branches had gaping holes in them. After 15 minutes of telling the kids to leave the rotten apples on the ground, and searching for good apples still on the trees, we had 4- yes, F-O-U-R apples in our basket. There were lots of other families experiencing the same dilemma- lots of kids, not so many good apples. But we eventually found a tree that had been overlooked by the masses and spared from the storm, and we wound up with about 10 pounds of tasty Honeycrisp apples to take home.

As part of the orchard experience, we also went for a hayride, and the kids had a blast playing in/on a huge pile of hay and wandering through the mini-maze. We all had a great time, and the kids are looking forward to inviting Grandpa and Grandma to join us next year!

goodbye cribs- it's been a good 3 years!

After nearly 39 months of relative confinement, J & O have finally made the transition to big beds...err...BED. We've been putting it off due to what I like to call "floorplan issues" in our house, but finally found a solution that seems to work, at least for now. For those who haven't been to our house, we've got a split entry with 2 bedrooms on the upper level, and 2 bedrooms on the lower level. The master bedroom is upstairs, so naturally we put the kids in the other room on the same level- an arrangement that served us well, since we do most of our living on the upper floor.

Now, Little Miss O has been vaulting out of her crib for well over a year now- I think we've got a future gymnast on our hands- and about the time she started, I dug out the instructions for the cribs to figure out how to convert them to toddler beds. Imagine my surprise to find that they are not 3 in 1 cribs, rather 2 in 1, and they will only convert to full size beds. CRAP. There's no way 2 full size beds were going to fit in that room, and I just couldn't move my precious little ones to the lower level to fend for themselves. Buying single beds to get them through a year or two until they could move into their own rooms seemed like a colossal waste of money. So in the cribs they stayed, O climbing in and out like she was stepping over a crack in the sidewalk, and J yelling for help when he was ready to get in our out.

Until last Friday.

Steve and I disassembled the cribs, and swapped them for a queen size bed from one of the spare rooms. Our solution was/is to have them sleep together...after all, they weigh a whopping 54 lbs combined, and a queen size bed provides PLENTY of space for them. Plus, they're twins. They like to be close, right? And it's not a lifetime commitment- they'll move downstairs in a year or so when they're ready.

Friday night was pretty rough, but we expected that it would be. Bedtime normally takes, ummm...2 minutes, and it took about an hour for them to settle down and go to sleep. Saturday night was a breeze, but I was out with some friends, so Daddy got to enjoy that victory. Sunday night was a NIGHTMARE. Perhaps it seemed worse because the adults in the house were trying to watch the Red Sox/Rays game (bummer, Sox), but it was like the kids had injected pure sugar straight into their veins. They were wild. J actually laughed at me when I told him he was being naughty and that I was getting mad. Nothing like that to send mom into orbit. But they eventually settled down and went to sleep, and they've been doing great ever since. I check on them before I go to bed every night, and I usually have to spin J around so that he's got his head on the pillow instead of his feet, but he'll get it figured out. And in the meantime, he's got O as a "bumper" to keep him from falling out all together. Kinda like being in the womb again?!?

everybody's doin' It...

...so why not join them! I've been following the blogs of several of my friends for awhile now, and I've found it entertaining...and a little bit addicting, I must admit! So what the heck- I've decided that it's my turn to take a stab at it. We've got friends and family in nearly every corner of the country, so if nothing else, this will be a way for everyone to keep up on what's going on in our neck of the woods. So without further adieu, here we go!