Elizabeth's Fourth Birthday!!

Elizabeth celebrated her 4th birthday on Sunday with a party at our house - mostly staff and their kids and also her friends Amanda and Toby. (It's hard to get a good picture of her, she is silly...) We had cake and ice cream and she opened her presents. Almost all her presents were princess-type dress-up things. I'll post some dress-up pictures later. She had a good time, but had some sharing issues.....we had a talk about it and when the kids came to our house again today for staff fellowship she was SOOOO much better.

We have a busy week ahead of us....partly my own stuff and partly Luke's busy-ness. But the light at the end of the tunnel is our date Friday night. For those of you who don't know, we've had this awesome babysitting co-op for 3 years now. Currently there are 3 families involved, so every third week we babysit all the kids (9 altogether) and the weeks in between we get to go out on Friday night from 6-9. Sometimes I think I take it for granted, but this week it will be greatly appreciated. I highly recommend the arrangement for those of you with young kids. A frequent date night is wonderful for marriage!!

Elizabeth hates all the Halloween stuff at the stores. She had a major breakdown at Target this morning when I tried to walk through the Halloween display to get to the Garden Center. I needed to buy flowers to take to a meeting tomorrow. Instead we did our best to walk as far around it as we could and only cut through a tiny corner. She's gotten worse and worse about it and especially hates the "bones" (skeletons). I don't blame her. It's just hard when she causes a scene in a store...

Caleb is bothered by little and throws himself headlong into whatever he's doing. Literally. He often has bruises, bumps and cuts on his head. He can catch the chickens now and likes to carry them around with him. He's very sweet and says "Bye" to everyone he sees. He still loves hugs and cuddling.

Fall here means temperatures in the 80's and sometimes 70's. And eventually rain. But not yet. This week it's actually supposed to be 90 a couple of days. Yuck. The leaves fall off the trees in late November. But anything is better than 100 degrees!!! So I'm enjoying it as much as I can.