October in Vegas

I have to admit- the boiling hot summer was definitely worth it. We are enjoying walking around without jackets, and it was pretty fun to plan princess costumes knowing we wouldn't have to cover them up with coats!

We went to a pumpkin patch in short sleeves.
"What is IN this thing?!?"



We visited a farm named "The Farm," and went on a hayride.
The whole place was a money trap, but the kids had fun getting their faces painted, petting cats, feeding animals, and pretending to drive parked "tractors."






Mia's October history unit was on ancient Egypt, so we went to the King Tut exhibit at the natural history museum. She brought her book along and was excited to see her pictures in real life. (Everything was replicated, but whatever. ;D)

Yummy mummies



They requested this photo with the giraffe, and this was their pose idea:



We spent Zach's second day off since we moved here raking rocks and dirt. We're trying to plant lawn, but the birds keep eating the seeds and it's probably too chilly to germinate anyway. After spending hours digging one trench by hand, Zach broke down and rented a trencher. Worth every penny, he says. :) next we're going to break down and buy sod... haha.


Mia asked to be Rapunzel months ago, and I got it in my head for some reason that I could make her dress. I don't know how to work my hand-me-down sewing machine, and the last thing I sewed was a wind sock or something tubular in my middle school home-ec class. But we went to Wal-Mart and bought some purple and white material anyway. I found some free patterns online, and one that looked like Rapunzel's dress. There wasn't one for kids, but there was a little picture of what it's supposed to look like when you lay out the peices. So I printed that, cut out the little peices, and then held them close to my eye and kind of drew/traced them onto the material. Cutting everything out was pretty easy- I knew enough from watching my mom over the years that you can put the middle of things on the fold to make it perfectly symmetrical. Then I went and bought a needle and thread kit at Walmart and started sewing! It wasn't really hard- I think I spent less than three hours actually sewing. The really hard part was figuring out how in the heck to put stuff together before I sewed it so that it would end up right-side out and ugly-stuff in. And the sleeves- it was a good thing they had a drawing of how to sew the sleeves on, because at first I had no idea why the sleeves had those points coming out the top. For the hems I just used Liquid Stitch- there was no way I was going to figure out how to make lining for a dress that was going to be worn one night in the dark.And there we have it! My first sewing project! I'm so proud of it! But not proud enough to think I'll ever sew anything ever again. :)

Mia loved having long hair, and was so excited about her dress... it was all she talked about for weeks. I was so happy it actually worked, ha.


Anya and Bree kind of fell into their costume choices. They wanted to be princesses, and we had Aurora, Snow White and Cinderella left to choose from. They decided, we bought the wigs for 5 bucks at WalMart and ta-da!



Kael wore Mia's old lion costume that she never fit. Somehow we managed to cart it around through seven moves in-tact. He LOVES this thing. If he sees it, he must have it on. The first time we put it on, he wouldn't take it off. By Halloween, he would only wear it ten minutes at a time.


We had a Halloween party with our homeschooling group. My mother-in-law sent us a TON of awesome crafts from Oriental Trading Co. last year, and we only used a few things. So the kids all got to choose any project they wanted, and we had a little Halloween parade, decorated Halloween cupcakes, and went bobbing for apples. I love the moms in our group- they are so down-to-earth and nice.


We took graham-cracker owls to the neighbors again this year (benefit of moving- we can recycle ideas, ha.) It was fun to get to know people- there are a lot of nice families right on our street... something we missed in our Ohio subdivision. One family even brought us cookies the next day!

This was a busy month- but it was so nice to be busy doing something other than looking for a place to live, packing and unpacking, I'll take this kind of busy any time. :)