Eeek!  I'm so far behind on posts!  Just to recap since our last post:

We attended Bella and Jackson's open house at school...

Can you guess this years theme?

Jackson got to show his teacher off

and his skeleton...

Bella showed us around her classroom

and all her great projects she has been working on.

We were super excited as you can see...

Then we had to rush over to Cardi's first middle school orchestra performance.  The kids did a great job!

We stuck around for the treats afterwards

and ran into our friend, Anna and her family!

And so we took some photos, chatted about the performance and took some more photos.

Luckily for me my friend Heidi and her husband, Dirk were there too.  The performance was sold out and so Heidi waved Jackson and Bella over to sit with her on the steps in the aisle while I snapped pictures from the back.

I've been busy painting and moving furniture.  Our neighbor's sister was getting new bedroom furniture so she gave us her old set for free!

I didn't want to spend money on paint and so I used the eggshell white paint we had left over from repainting the walls.  Heidi said it looked "country chic."  I loved how it turned out except it didn't look good on this wall.  I finally ended up painting it a chocolate brown instead which turned out nicely.  Hmmm...some how I didn't get around to taking any pictures of the final paint job.  But, I did get a picture of what our kids look like when they are bored...

Someone decided wouldn't it be fun to put on "protective" gear, climb into the stroller and roll their siblings into the chain link fence. 

Sometime in the last 2 weeks, we went to our friend's Halloween party...

Where we hobnobbed with  pirates, witches, southern bells, and the grim weeper...

They were the best pirates/hosts...THANKS, Hannah and Tommy!

The kids and I took a  trip to the auto repair shop where they were kind enough to fix our flat...

And John was kind enough to entertain Meredith and I...

And these great ladieswere kind enough to  get up bright and early on a Saturday to welcome 2 new Beehives into the Young Women's Program.

Thanks, Bianca and Carlee for helping cut out all these hearts!  I "heart" you!

Finally, on Saturday our ward had their annual Halloween Festival.  I couldn't think of a costume so at the last minute I cut out some pumpkins and pinned them on...I was a pumpkin patch and Meredith was a pumpkin...James looked cute in his letterman jacket, Jackson was a pirate and of course John was spiderman!  I didn't get any great pictures but Bella was a jack in the box...I mean Bella in the box...(She was super cute!)  and this sweet kid

decided that she wanted to be Dorothy from the "Wizard of Oz"  about an hour before the festival began.  I kept trying to convince her to be a witch again but she was so excited to be Dorothy.  She went through her closet and found a dress and then we ran to Dollar General to pick up some red paint and glitter...30 minutes later we had these...

And you know what?  I think there really is no place like home.