Our fun week - fall crafts, football, orchestra & a conference

 Brothers :)  Aren't they sweet?  (I mean at this particular moment in time - ha.  There are plenty of times when the three year old is *not* so sweet to his baby brother.)

Actually he usually is pretty sweet.  It's just that he a give-a-lot-of-hugs kind of guy and the baby is more of a get-out-of-my-face kind of guy :)  These guys are as opposite as can be.  The three year old is shy, afraid of everything (I only wish I was exaggerating) and pretty low key.  He loves to be read to and to snuggle.  The baby on the other hand is all energy.  He prefers his space (though he likes cuddling with mama) and he doesn't like the three year old constantly trying to hug him.  He won't sit still for a whole book and he's very outgoing.  Nothing low key about this one :) 

 On Thursday we did a daycare activity with all the kids.  I'm thinking of starting a blog just for the daycare stuff, but I need to talk to parents first, so until then, you just get pictures of my children doing the activities.  Anyway, it was a simple fine-motor-skills activity, where they glued a bunch of yellow, orange and red pieces of construction paper onto a printed page with a tree on it.  They loved it.  The three year old really hated getting glue on his fingers and didn't add many more scraps to his tree.

 He did some more coloring though.  The little case of crayons on the side are his own.  Each child has a little travel soap box of crayons (got the crayons for a penny at back to school sales), and each case is labeled with a child's name.  I got tired of them all fighting over the crayons, and inevitably I would have one kid who broke or bit the tips off the crayons, and it wasn't fair to the rest of them to have to have broken crayons.  This way, the only person's crayons they mess up are their own.  And actually, since I've gone to this system where they have ownership over their crayons, I haven't had any of the kids try to destroy them.

 Here are a few of the finished papers.

 Another craft we did this week was to make headband bunny ears.  We are going through the alphabet, and this was just a project I thought up on the spur of the moment.  I got to thinking I could do a different headband for each letter, so we're going to have to go back and do A.  I'm thinking A is for Antlers.  It is hunting season here after all ;)

 You might have noticed the bunny ears picture was taken while my child was in a bucket.  I think I ought to buy enough buckets for everyone to have one.  Seriously.  I wouldn't need any other toys at all.  The baby likes to craw into them when they're laying on their sides, the other kids pack them around, crawl in and on them... The possibilities are endless :)

 We had a treat on Friday getting to see our daughter sing in chapel at college again.  It's a little easier to pick her out in this one.  She is in the back row - the short girl between the two tall girls :)

 Another picture of it.  These are pictures I took with my camera of the computer screen, so they're not real clear.  I watch the chapel service every morning on live streaming.  If you're interested, the website is ambassadors.edu and the chapel service begins at 9 am eastern on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
 

 Friday was quite a busy day.  The big county rivalry football game was in our town.  These two towns are arch rivals.  They even have a trophy for the winner of the county game.  There are only the two school districts in the entire county, so these two teams are it.  But can you see that trophy by the water cooler?  These guys take their rivalry very seriously.  The trophy was on our bench because we won it last year.

 Did I mention it was freezing cold and windy?  Yep.  Just another day in Wyoming :)

 The final score was 53-24 in our favor!

 Right after that, the eight year old and I headed over to a concert at the high school auditorium.  Our local fine arts counsel does a wonderful job of bringing quality entertainment to our little town in the middle of nowhere.  Friday, we had the Glenn Miller Orchestra.  It was beyond amazing :)  If you ever get a chance to see them, don't pass it up.  You can check their schedule here.

 (Not a great picture, but we were in the back row - the eight year old's request - and couldn't use a flash).  During the intermission, the eight year old insisted that we buy a CD :)  So we went to the table to get one, and one of the band members manning the table asked the eight year old about the shirt he was wearing.  It was a ragged old football jersey... (yeah, who shows up to a concert in an old football jersey?  But that was what he had on for the football game.  I was not at all happy, because I had seen him in a nice dress shirt before we left and didn't realize that he had changed.) Anyway, the band member asked if it was Julius Pepper's old Carolina Panthers jersey.  It was.  The shirt is so old and ragged that the Panthers logo is worn off.  We were impressed.  Turns out the guy is a huge Bears fan and loves Julius Peppers...  It also turned out that he was one of two band members with the same first name as our eight year old, so they made a cool connection.  He and the other band member at the table signed our CD.  The eight year old was impressed :)  It was late when we got home - close to 10 pm and the eight year old was completely worn out.  It was a good day.

 The next morning, I got up at 5 am, showered, and hit the road for a training conference in Riverton.  The sun was coming up as I was headed into South Pass.  It was beautiful.

 What wasn't so beautiful were the road conditions.  I hit snow at the Louis Lake turn off.  Yes people, snow.   And it got worse as I drove on.

 I did make it safely to the conference and had a great day.  The classes were fun, lunch was great, and I made some new friends.  It was a good day. 

The only bad thing was that I left before the kids were up, and when I got home at 10 pm, the baby was in bed already, and the three year old crashed right after I got home.  They had been watching a movie with Dad, which always means blankets and pillows out all over the living room :)  Too cute.  They told me the baby looked for me all day, and crawled around the house yelling "Mama!" trying to find me.  Poor kid ;)  Poor Mama ;)