Winter is Here

This morning we had our first snow flurries that resulted in a white lawn. Jenny and Joe went outside to gather a couple of snowballs. Ellie thinks that snowballs taste really good! The first words out of Joe's mouth this morning when he came downstairs were "Are you freezing, Mom?" Welcome to winter again---we've been very spoiled this fall with warm weather.

Let's see what else is new. Jenny is working on cleaning out the horse stall to house her chickens. A friend of hers has chickens and hatched two for Jenny's birthday present. The "chickens-come-home" project will be worked on this weekend by Jenny and Bill.

Jack has a new interest, although I can't share what it is. He has been pouring himself into his new area of interest. He also has done some programming on the computer this week----amazes me!

Joe is working on some physical fitness exercises besides his door-climbing! He also is making his own dictionary. He has found some great words and illustrated their definitions. Do you know what skookum means? Look it up--a great word!

Nate is using more two and three word phrases. He isn't too fond of the gluten-free breads yet but does like the pancakes and waffles. We're working on finding recipes that we all like. Some of them I've even had to choke down. Nate prefers to spit them out rather than choke them down.

Ellie continues to bring smiles to our faces. Her latest fun activity is taking small pieces of toilet paper out of the bathroom and putting them in the toaster oven. Don't know what kind of goodie she is cooking up, but it does keep her busy! She is having lots of fun with her dollies---putting them in their crib, walking them in their stoller, and just carrying them around. Every once in awhile we need to give them all kisses too. Oh, the fun of a having an almost two year old girl!

I don't have any new pictures to post as our camera is in the shop, so I thought I'd post some recent fun ones.

Here's one of Joey doing his doorframe exercise:

One of Jack and Joe with a little too many bubbles:

A snowy day about two years ago:

Finally, a shot from a visit to the Milwaukee museum. This is in the kids area with a lot of butterfly info.

What we've been up to

The last couple weeks have been full of fall fun and changes! The kids have had lots of fun raking and jumping into lots of leaves! The older kids were jumping out of the trees into the big piles. They don't mind raking when they can have such fun with the leaves.

We had some pumpkin carving going on, although some of the pumpkins were "damaged" by Nate and Ellie---they found out that pumpkins just don't bounce like a basketball.

The older kids decided to dress up as Star Wars characters. Ellie was a lion although the kids said she was a Ewok, and Nate was a cowboy. We had a fun night!

After some additional testing, we've pulled gluten from Nate's diet and are waiting for results for the rest of the gang. I made my last batch of wheat bread and have tried making gluten-free bread. Let's just say I'm on the bottom of the learning curve! After my attempts, Bill had some new "bricks" for his repair work on the pig shed.

We've been gluten free for Nate for about ten days and are already seeing positive results with his speech which is extremely exciting for us!

Here are some additional pictures of our last couple of weeks:

Jenny reading---we've found Jenny reading in many different spots. She always seems to have a book in her hands.

Joey playing a little football. He is hoping the Bengals will have a winning season.

And finally, the leader of our clan taking a little "time-out". I don't think I could snooze leaning up against the kitchen cupboards, but a guy has to get a little snooze in where and when possible!