4 years old!

This vibrant, rambunctious, irrepressible, loving little girl is 4 years old! Fiona definitely livens up our life and you never know what she's going to come up with next.

Holiday Fun!

Wildfires, con't

Pray for rain!  One of the local fires has grown to over six thousand acres.  This is the view from our porch.  We can barely breath. 

Wildfires

Usually I can see all of downtown and mountains all the way from Tennessee from our back porch.  This is all I could see 2 days ago ...

The smell of smoke is awful.  There have been at least 13 forest fires raging in in the last 2 weeks.  The range from 5 to several hundred acres.  We are desperate for rain.

The smoke started clearing today and gives me a clear view of the forest fires.  It also shows you how much was hidden the other day.  

We've had 75 days with no rain.  We live in a temperate rain forest for goodness sake!  Rain every single day is normal.  There are fire crews from all around the country here right now.  The entire town is pitching in to help them. 

We just need rain!

Corn Maze and Hayride

The Wasilik Poplar

This past weekend we enjoyed a hike to the Wasilik Poplar - the 2nd largest tree on the east coast! 

It's dying so I'm glad we went.  It's almost completely hollow. 

Everyone inside the tree!

Daddy carrying both toddlers back up!

Moments

This is why I make photo books every year.

County Fair 2016

We love our county fair.  It's an old school agriculture fair with no rides - yes, you heard me right.  But so much fun!

Our homeschool co-op's educational booth got first place!  The kids were very excited.

The theme was "Celebrate and Educate".  The silhouettes of moms are celebrating in the back and the children's pictures are are attached to fall vegetables as our "harvest".  My little bowl of potatoes.  :) 

And as tradition demands we went to Dairy Queen after the fair!  

Co-op begins!

Today was our first day of homeschool for the school year.  Five years of fun with these amazing families! They are a wonderful group of ladies and children and we all love going.  It was great!  We went to Chick-Fil-A afterwards as a first day treat and since they talked about sculpting and Donatello the kids played with playdough most of the afternoon.  Love that!

Busy Days of Fall

 My day included morning snuggles, schoolwork, early lunch, Chandler’s first gymnastics class of the season, driving to the next town, Claire's tutoring, Walmart, dinner, laundry, switching rabbits into new cages, prepping for our first co-op of the school year tomorrow .... I'm beat! 

Though I have to add, while Claire was doing her tutoring in one of the library study rooms Chandler played on the computer (Fiona and Declan were home napping with my Mom).  I was very impressed to find out that Chandler has his entire library card number memorized so he can go on the computer without his physical card. Wow!