Eyeballs Anyone?

I made fun "forked eyeballs" to take as dessert for our church supper last night. They were a huge hit, I probably could have made a double batch and still not had enough! Autumn thought they were very cool and had fun helping to dip the donuts in the chocolate.

And then there are my two very mature "children". These are ping pong balls that we found in a dollar bin at the party store. Autumn and Kurt have way too much fun with them!

Comments

You may notice that now if you want to leave a comment you have to go through a security hoop. I had to do this because I was getting a lot of spam and other not so nice things in my comment's section. So now I can monitor comments before they go onto the blog. Sorry about the extra step but I felt it needed to be done.

James Brown or Batman?

Autumn's Batman costume may not be ready for her to wear but her animals are all ready for trick-or-treating. I have to tell you that I really love e-bay. These, even with shipping, were CHEAP! There are others of the same characters on there that were NOT cheap but since these were listed as used we could indulge. :)

Here we have Autumn and Kurt doing a pretty good impression of James Brown

Pumpkins in the (h)air

I'm on a list for parents who are helping each other out with advice and "I'd never do this again's" and product reviews, etc for skin and hair care for kids with mixed or African heritage. A while ago someone posted pictures of some homemade beads. I recently attempted this myself and here is the result. I may never get these out of Autumn's hair! We were making bread this weekend. I ended up making 8 loaves. Each recipe made two loaves and I ended up making one twice since after we made the first batch Autumn decided that we had made them for her teachers at church. So.......They got some yummy pumpkin zucchini bread and so did we. We also made pumpkin banana and pumpkin cranberry breads. Do you sense a theme here? I have a pumpkin gingerbread loaf I want to try next. Autumn loves to help bake but she rarely eats her creations, even though I now use an egg replacer when doing all baking. She sure loves the dough though. However, breads are one thing she will bake and eat, so I'm stocking up!

Bonding

A bit of Daddy - Daughter bonding time. Autumn and Kurt had a grand time building a track first in the kitchen and then down the stairs. It was a very hot day a couple of days ago, I'm lucky I got Autumn to put shorts on. For a while there she was happy to run around au natrual. :)

New Addition

We have a new addition. Meet Skeletor. We put him up in the yard yesterday and Autumn spent a lot of time talking to him and for him. It was so funny. These pictures show her talking for him and he was talking to me, telling me how chilly he was and that he wanted chocolate and that he would cook my supper for me. When she was talking to him I didn't catch half of what she said but apparently his responses were hilarious because she would laugh and laugh.

Robot Autumn

Autumn discovered that she could be a robot. She was watching a cartoon recently in which all the robots broke down but continued to say "all systems A-OK" In the other pictures she is attempting to mail herself to grandma. When that failed she decided she was a present and Kurt and I took turns "giving" her to each other. She is such a kook!

And Awaaaaaay We Go!

Dear Friends and Family and any complete strangers who are reading this :)

We are starting the process for another adoption. We are very excited, nervous, worried, scared, impatient,.....well any of those feelings you get when you find out you are pregnant. The differences being that we need to SAVE money and we have no idea of the timeline. Could be 2 years could be 3 months. We've started a change jar that every piece of loose change is going into. We've cut many things out of our daily lives in order to be able to save more. We bought a house in order to have more room to grow as a family (I know, not much on the saving end there). We are taking each step as our savings allows. When we get through the home study part then we can start applying for grants and looking for other sources of funding.

We are going to try our darnedest not to take out a loan. Initially we had talked about that possibility and even checked with the Dave Ramsey foundation to make sure that was OK -- we are taking the Financial Peace University course (where they tend to frown on adding to your debt rather than taking away from it) and were told that the plan we had in place to pay it all off was a good one so not something to shy away from.

But since we recently had to add to our debt due to repairs on the house..........we are trying to stay away from that possibility. Any mileage money I get will go into our fund, any bonuses we get will go into our fund, any birthday/Christmas money will go into our fund.......you start to see the picture. We ask for your prayers that God provides what we need when we need it. We ask for prayers that God puts the people in our path who can help us reach this goal. And we ask for prayers that once again we are following God's plan and not our plan, patience and peace.

A Moving Dune

By the time we got back to this sign on the way out the sand was covering up the DO NOT RUN line and it was hard to make out the "return climb is extremely exhausting" line.

Sand dunes are constantly in motion due to weather and land shifts and wave action. These dunes move 1-2 feet a year, I know, doesn't sound like much but look at these pictures. We were there in mid-late August. And the benches you see here were completely uncovered and usable not two weeks before.

This one was the least buried of all the benches we saw. We could only find the boardwalk in one place, way out at the end of the walk and then only for maybe 30-40 feet.

Couple of fun Vidoes

Here are a couple of videos from our trip, one of Autumn racing down the dune and one of her washing windows.

Rest of our Trip

We found a boat in the back shed that my brother built when he was probably 5 or so. Autumn had a great time pulling it around.

Here's a few pictures of daily life at our brown house. We borrowed a motor boat from the neighbors for a boat ride one day. Very exciting stuff! We went "fast fast way out to the blue".

Autumn helped wash the windows. They were pretty dirty on the outsides and after we cleaned we could see much better.

One day we drove M22 all the way up to the top of the peninsula and back down the other side. We were a bit worried on the northbound trip and being on the windward side it was pretty blustery and windy. When we rounded the top (stopping at the lighthouse there) and headed south along the lee side it was a completely different planet! You can see Autumn playing in Sutton's Bay and below that was about an hour before at our lunch at Peterson Park......completely different

Many days we hung out at our beach just playing in the water, digging in the sand, pulling fun and interesting things off the beach after winds blew them up. We found a towel, a bucket, a yard stick, some kind of handle for a boat rope, lots of drift wood and other things.

What a Cutie!

We interrupt this vacation log to bring you this picture of Autumn. It was snapped by someone from our church while we were all waiting at the staging area for the Burnsville Fire Muster Parade on Sunday the 12th.

Sleeping Bear Dunes

As is tradition we went to climb Sleeping Bear Dunes. Autumn looked at it from the car and thought she'd died and gone to heaven. She was so eager to get out of the car and climb and play in her big sandbox that she got tangled up in her seatbelts. As you can see below she was half way up before we were even at the foot. She ran all the way up without stopping, I swear it only took her 2 minutes. We walked across the top for a while but didn't attempt the 1.5 mile trek to Lake Michigan on the other side. "Why not?" you say? because a 1.5 mile hike is easy and fun, but when you do it across dunes......it takes hours.

Do you see what we found in the sand?

When we ran all the way down to the bottom we played in the sand for a while. Autumn had fun buryign our feet. Somehow Kurt really doesn't look much shorter!

Wipe Out!

See my footprints mom?

Two days before we were going to leave Autumn wanted to go to the big sandbox again. So we took her, I hadn't planned to climb the dratted thing again. She went half way up and down and half way up and down and played at the bottome (repeat a couple dozen times). The next time I looked up (and it couldn't have been more than 3-4 min) She was at the top!!!! Well, of course she couldn't hear me yelling to come down. So up I went after her, I couldn't trust her not to take off over the other hills on the top of the dunes. We stayed at the top for a bit, met people who were going further over when they past us. Autumn met a new friend who was all in pink and when she saw Autumn's "Boney" (fossil rex) she had to stop and talk dinosaurs with Autumn. They are about a month apart and I'm glad they understood each other because her grandparents and I only caught about 1 word in 8. Eventually we ran back down and headed home to have a picnic on the dock.