Trick or Treating 2K12

 Thomas, Jacob, and Jack

Cowboy Festival

Jeff took the boys to the Cowboy Festival at the Booth Museum today (while I stayed at home and did some homeschool planning) and it sounds like they had a great time again!  The proof's in the pudding...or pictures...

Jacob went up for the roping demonstration!

Thomas' favorite thing was the alligator:

Jacob liked the bear:

Did a little archery

Taking in a Native American dance:

This performance was Jacob's favorite part:

Thomas was obviously pleased with something

The boys took part in the cowboy kids parade where they walked and showed off their costumes!

Being "judged"...I don't think they were actually judged, I think it was one of those "everyone's a winner" things--which is clearly not true.  Jacob and Thomas had to have been the cutest cowboys there.  

Jeff said Thomas got a little excited at this point and wouldn't stop jumping around.  You can see he is in the air in this picture!

Small Group Adventuring

This Sunday our small group headed out into the wilds of NE GA!  OOOOOOOOOO!!!!AHHHHHHH!!!

We planned to hit up Burt's Pumpkin Palace...or something like that...and fill our afternoon with harvest activities at the patch.  That didn't happen.  We got closer and closer to Burt's and Jeff and I got more and more nervous about what was awaiting us...yellow road signs that said things like "CONGESTED AREA" in the middle of the stinkin' mountains were scaring us BAD!  What could all this "congestion" be from?  Certainly not the pumpkin patch that we have told the whole small group they should drive an hour and a half to...after a full morning of church...with small children in tow!!  But, alas, once we were a mile or so away, our worst fears were realized and we got our first look at Burt's...and it was horrendous.  It literally looked like it was standing room only in a gravel lot filled with a bunch of already picked pumpkins!  The first lot we passed (a big one) was full...so we went on.  We rode around that second lot two times before finding an empty spot, and on the way around, we noticed...now this is weird...lots of people appeared to be "tailgating" at the pumpkin patch!  It was creepy and it scared me again because I thought maybe they knew something I didn't know and we were about to be stuck here in traffic for hours on end with no food and drink?!  (In the end, I don't really understand why so many people brought chairs and were tailgating here...whenever I saw something odd, like dads in fancy plaid shirts with Patagonia vests, khaki pants and driving mocs, pushing wheelbarrows filled with $300 worth of pumpkins, I just attributed it to "they're from the fancy part of Atlanta and don't know what to do with themselves out here"  So those tailgaters were probably just Atlanta roadtrippers)

So yea, this place was packed, there was no "patch" to pick a pumpkin in so far as we saw...and there were no children's activities...and we had driven an hour and a half.  That concludes Burt's.

About as good as we got for the pumpkin picture 

Pretty silly kids! 

 Just Adam/worship leader reclining on some pumps...

And, our son, imitating Adam on the pumpkins!

But thank goodness our group is filled with some Georgians who know a thing or two about stuff to do and so it was suggested that we go to a nearby waterfall and check it out since we were all the way out that way already and had not spent much time at all at the patch!  It was an adventure with so many little kids, but it was really beautiful and the whole day created a LOT of memories for us all I believe!  The "family pictures" that Jeff took toward the end are pretty awesome and hilarious:

 "Wow!  Look how brave and adventurous and granola-y this small group is! And look at how many children they are forcing down the trail too!" --said hundreds of onlookers in the woods---

 Pretty precious...only minus three little ones

 Addy and Jacob

 You know us, right?

 Jeannie, Corey, Jack and Zane

 Adam, Alivia, Amy, Addy and Anna...oh my gosh!  ALL THEIR NAMES START WITH A'S!!!

Emmett, Jenny, Jonathan, Natlaie and Karis (by far the funniest set of pictures to look through...thank you Karis for bringing joy and laughter into my life)

The Battle of Lamplighter Cove

Recently, we've had a lot of head to head combat goin' on up in these parts of the cul-de-sac.  There are guns and ammo and camo and who knows what else all over the place these days!  It's a real war zone people.  Thankfully, we have two heroes protecting our turf:

Fixin' Her Up

Not that this house needs much work, I mean it was in prettyabout  fantastic shape when we got here about 7 months ago, the only thing is, and this is a good thing, it's kind of a blank canvas type house!  Everything had been redone, and so all drywall was painted a nice shade of tan (which we'll surely keep in some areas). It was nice to move into a house like that because Jeff and I are INSANE about some things and we probably wouldn't have been able to sleep at night in a room that was, like, forest green, since our bedding doesn't match.  This way, there was time to sleep on it, and start planning what we wanted to do where, and we've finally made some baby steps!

We like to eat din din with other folks, so we knew that we wanted to eventually have a dining room table-although not formal-with lots of seating so we could have everyone sit together when they came to eat.  So Jeff got on that, as we mentioned in a previous post, and he built us a Williams Sonoma knock off table! 

 We also wanted to have a bench on one side (so we could accommodate innumerable children bottoms at once), so Jeff got on that too and crafted a fancy little thing!  

Finally, well, not finally, because this part's not quite done, but I wanted to find some thrift store chairs (so as not to spend much moolah) and recover and paint them a bright color. Would you believe that Jeff found the chairs as well?  But don't worry, I did the painting and recovering!  We still need one more arm chair (we have one which wasn't pictured), which will be mismatched which is fine with us, and I am going to try to head back to this antique store around here and grab a toddler chair for the toddler in our lives.  That guy's gonna get painted a DIFFERENT color!  "OOOOHHHHHHH!!!!!  How clown like will she make this dining room?!" I hear you asking.  

Into the kitchen, we have this tile picked out for the backsplash which I'm pretty crazy about, but just haven't gotten that whole project in order, so I think that's what slowed down any further decision making in that room.  But, you know what ?  I bit the bullet and purchased enough fabric when I got the stuff to cover the dining room chairs to make a couple cornice boxes for the kitchen windows.  I LOVE the fabric, it's bright and makes me very happy, and since I spend like 42 hours a day in the kitchen, I felt as though a nice cheery, colorful fabric was a good choice!

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I had also made that mirror a while back (it's made of cut up and glued together toilet paper rolls) and painted it white (since I didn't know what direction we would be going with the kitchen), and it just irked me for two reasons :1.)  I insisted on hanging it myself, when Jeff was at work, and I hung it like 1.5 inches too low and it will bother me til the day I die if I don't eventually fix it  2.)  It just blended in with the wall and you could barely even see it.   Once the cornices were up, I had a burst of energy and ripped that mirror off the wall, grabbed a can of spray paint that we already had (thankfully), and painted that bad boy a nice blue.  I LOVE it again!  Awwww, what a happy ending!  

I also had a ridiculous amount of paint left over from the chairs and thought that I could do a tiny little update and tie the two rooms together...kind of on the DL...by painting the insides of the two glass cabinets we have.  Man, that was a simple, straight forward job and I think it made a pretty big difference.  Again, this is coming from the gal who spends more hours than there are in a day in that kitchen.   

So, once the tile is up we will decide what we want to do with wall color in here, but I am pretty darn sure that I want to paint.  What color is TBD!

Here are some other pictures to keep you coming back for more:

Checking out Tellus for the morning: 

Jacob the Astronaut

My best shot of the bros looking all dapper:

And, I really wanted to have this picture with the sun shining on them...and here's how that idea worked out for me:

Snacking and getting prepared to play some shoeless football (since I forgot his shoes at home)

Jacob being hard core at Dellinger Park, the most populous park in town...he kept saying, "Mom, I think a lot of those little kids were looking at me when I came onto the field.".  The gawking onlookers were no doubt awed because they thought themselves to be in the presence of Clemson royalty.  

Jacob 

And, Jacob and Thomas picked some leaves from around our yard the other day and we made a fall tree:

And that concludes our lives up to 8:30 this Tuesday evening!