Rachel's spider aunts

Earlier this week I was working on some Christmas presents for some of Rachel's aunts and Rachel kept trying to help. I told her that they were for her aunts. So for the rest of the day everytime she saw what I had made she said, "These are for my aunts. These are for my aunts." Then yesterday she saw them again and said, "These are for my spiders." Apparently she was saying ants, not aunts. :) I got a good chuckle out of that.

Pumpkin patch

On Saturday we went out to Apple Annie's Pumpkin Patch down in Wilcox. It was a nice day, though we had hoped it would have felt a little more like fall. We had a good time out there. And took LOTS of pictures.

We went on a hay ride pulled by a smaller tractor than this. When we told Rachel we were going to a farm with Grandma and Grandpa she said, "And Ganpa Jolley?" She still remembers the cows and tractor ride from our Idaho trip. :)

We searched for the perfect Rachel pumpkin.

Grandpa helped her cut it off the vine.

Rachel rode a pumpkin or two.

 

After the pumpkin patch we went to the corn maze. This is what we saw of Rachel most of the time:

"We're following the leader, the leader, the leader. We're following the leader wherever she may go." (Rachel recently watched Peter Pan, and now when she's the leader she tends to sing that.)

 

We started getting a little hot as we neared the end of the maze. Rachel's face was all flushed from the heat.

 

At the end of the corn maze we sat around a little and attempted some family photos. Because of the red tent we were under, most of the photos turned out with us looking rather red:

So we black and white-ed them and now they look pretty good:

 

 

 

 

Grandpa was taking advantage of Rachel's overalls and helping her fly. She loved it. "Again! Again!"

We'll have to visit Apple Annie's again. :)

A whole lot of nothin'

I feel like it's been a while since I posted anything on the blog, but there's nothing really of note that's been going on. I've been keeping pretty busy running around, but nothing really stands out as anything out of the ordinary.

We've decorated a little for Halloween (and Rachel is VERY excited to be Princess Pea). I made those easy paper pumpkins and copied these pumpkin/ghost/monster jars for a little extra decoration this year.

Rachel found "her" goggles again, and every time she finds them (after a week or two seperation) she thinks they're the coolest things in the world.

Yesterday Rachel got shot. Twice. Afterwards to help ease the pain, she got this delicious lollypop, which obviously was doing it's job well (with a little help from her "milkie").

And now she is immunized against swine and regular (human?) flu. (Why doesn't the regular flu have some cool animal name attached to it, like the sloth flu, or wombat flu, or bat flu (or is that called rabies)? It would make the miserableness a little more worth it if you could at least say "I have the python flu," or something of the sort.)

The Playground

We went to the park this morning and invited some friends along to enjoy the park for the first time in a long time (it's been too hot since maybe April). I brought the camera for a fun photo shoot of all the kids and they all had a good time running around, climbing and sliding.

Rachel is quite the ladder climber.

These three girls have lots of fun together (and have some good fights, too). Rachel and Lydia are less than a month apart, and Maryanne is about 6 months older.

Rachel loves hanging on this bar. Even if it does make her shirt look like an immodest belly shirt. :)

Mountain air

We headed up Mt. Lemmon Saturday to enjoy the fall weather that has come to Tucson. It hasn't hit 100 degrees for at least a week and a half, and has been under 90 for the last week. So up the mountain we went for some fun fall family time.

Rachel doesn't have her own camp chair, so her umbrella stroller substituted nicely as a chair for her.

Not that she sat for long. She "cooked" pine cones, carrying armfuls at a time to the grill to add to her collection.

She walked on this "balance beam" about 50 times.

She found a fun log to bounce on.

We ate some snacks (though we were sorry we hadn't brought an actual lunch, and plan on doing that soon).

 

And we tried a few family photos while we were up in the beautiful forest. It was a lovely day and we plan on doing it again soon (before our pass expires at the end of this month).

Afterwards we went to visit Reese at Grandma and Grandpa Knight's house to feed him while they were visiting San Francisco for Jared's baby blessing.

It's a good thing Reese likes Rachel and puts up with her hugging. He is such a weird dog; if any other kid gets within a couple of feet he'll growl and snap at them. But not Rachel. I guess she shares her food often enough to endear him to her.

Here are a couple last random pictures from last week:

First, Rachel with her "Eew, gross!" face on after she tasted the salt and pepper concoction she had poured into her bowl while I had my back turned.

And lastly, a sneak preview of Halloween:

I finished Rachel's Princess Pea dress and had her try it on to make sure it fit. She immediately demanded her wand (which has been hidden for a month or so) and later refused to take it off. Seriously, she ran and "hid" in a little nook between her bookcase and wall saying "No! My princess dress!" I had to unzip it and let her walk around for a while before it fell off on it's own, then I pried it out of her fingers when she was carrying/dragging it around afterwards. I have a feeling she'll be wearing this everyday after Halloween is over.

2-year-old, here we come

We've been experiencing the budding 2-year-old in Rachel lately. There's still a month and a half until she turns two, but she's been insisting on picking out her own clothes lately, and yesterday and today has been so adamant about dressing herself, even though she can only get her shorts on correctly by herself about 25% of the time. But if she doesn't get her way, she just throws a fit. So fun. Also, she delights in taking everything out of its place and throwing it across the floor. And tearing up perfectly good books. And if I even try to clean it up, she works double time to make her house just how she likes it: "I'm making a mess, Mom!"

 Rachel in her too-small pajamas that she insisted on wearing over her clothes

One good thing, has happened lately, though, with this new-found "maturity." She has started using the potty 100% of the time (when she's awake). Okay, maybe 90%, but I'll take that. It's only a few accidents a week, and she's even going number 2 in the potty these days. This morning I heard her in the other room, "Mommy! I went poo poo! Yea!" So I went in to check, and sure enough, she'd gone in the potty and pulled her panties and shorts back on all by herself (though I'm pretty sure she didn't wipe, so I fixed that). Yea for (partial) potty independence! :)

We were sitting around the other day playing with something when all of a sudden Rachel says, "Mom, I need to go to Walgreens." Weirdo. Walgreens is her favorite store ever. All because of their colorful cup display she tries to destroy every time we go there. So instead of actually going to Walgreens to scatter cups all over the store, she got her little grocery cart and went on a shopping spree at our house. I had got to be her cashier to ring up her stuff about 5 times in row. She may just grow up to be a shopaholic.

This weekend we enjoyed LDS General Conference, watching it with my parents on the BYU channel they get with Direct TV. It was great, as always, to hear from our prophet and apostles. I got a lot out of it (thanks to having other people around to help with Rachel, and her afternoon naps that coincided perfectly with the afternoon sessions). I'm so grateful to have a prophet to teach us today. It's nice to know that God loves us enough to give us someone to address our problems as they come these days, and we don't have to rely solely on something written hundreds of years ago (though I also love the Bible and Book of Mormon).

Rachel and Grandma between sessions enjoying the beautiful fall weather (which we hope lasts more than 3 days).