Fall Is In The Air!

It was such a beautiful day today, so we headed out in search of Fall colors, and boy did we find them! There were so many pretty pictures, I had a hard time choosing for the blog. I think I narrowed it down to 11 here, but this is just a sampling.

Silver Fun!

The Special Olympics Regional Bowling Tournament was held Saturday and Seth received a silver medal! It was a long day, but Seth and all of his teammates did a great job handling the waiting. Five teams from across the region competed. Our team took 54 athletes to the event which was a huge turnout for us.

I don't have all of the results yet, but will edit this post when I get that information. It seems like we were pretty heavy on golds and silvers so it will be interesting to see. Everybody had a fabulous time and that is the most important.

As The Clock Turns

Grover and Goni had a garage sale last weekend and Seth was mesmerized with this clock. He wanted to buy it but I did my best to sway him away from it. The "cherished heirloom" hung in the Laseke's house for many years, but they decided it was time for it to find a new home. Unfortunately....er, I mean ..... fortunately, nobody else decided their home was the place for it, so Grover graciously brought it in as a present for Seth. I will forever be in their debt.......The clock can be set to play every hour on the hour, OR (and this was it's only saving grace), it can be set to play only when you push the button. Also, another very important quality is that there is a volume control. Mind you, in this video the volume is set on approximately 2 on a scale of 10. Can you imagine this playing every hour! Aaagh! The repertoire consists of about 12 songs if Lacey counted correctly. Yes, she did play it many times to come to that conclusion. MANY times!

I suppose I am glad that the clock has found a loving home instead of the garage sale reject pile. Seth can be assured that he will have at least one piece of "furniture" to take with him when he moves out someday. = )

Safety First

Seth is doing very well with his new job of safety patrol. I parked near the school this morning hoping to remain "incognito", and for the most part I did. I also wanted to make these pictures into a slideshow but could not do that within the blog post so instead you get one picture at a time -- pity, pity! Anyway....here is Seth bringing out his safety patrol cones and flag.

He has to place the cones to block off one of the lanes, and here he is checking for traffic prior to stepping out to place the cones.
Now he has placed them, but he is not positive if they are where they should be so he is checking with the teacher who is just out of the picture.
Now he is at his post. It looks like he is looking at me, but amazingly, he has not spotted me.
His first student of the day.

Doing his job -- except his right hand is supposed to be out too (we are still working on this). = )

OK, now I'm busted! I would have gotten away with it, but I cleared my throat and he heard that and spotted me. Dang! This look was followed by a "Maaaahhhmmm, what you doing here?!" and then a look that clearly told me he wanted me to go.

It is obviously not cool to have your Mom taking your picture. How dare I?? Later I told him it's my Mom privilege but he's not buying it!

Beach Babes

It's a miracle, but we finally got the entire family, including the dogs, to the beach for a weekend. The weather was beautiful, a little cloudy, but warm and very pleasant. Lacey practiced her golf swing out in the yard. She actually sent one of her hits into the dunes! I'm not good at distance, but I'd guess 75 to 100 feet.

Erik went to the local fish market and bought items for the boy feast. Here's Seth with his dinner. And the boys getting ready to dive in. (It's root beer in the wine glass) :-)Unfortnately, Seth talks big, but he actually only ate the fish, he sent the crab, clams and oysters to Erik instead of trying them. I think he would have liked the steamer clams if he had tried them, but it didn't happen.

On Sunday, it was time to take Lily to the beach for her very first time. She was excited about riding in the truck with the kids but as it turned out she is not very much into the beach. She was a bit of a wuss. She was skittish about the waves coming in, scared to death when she stepped on a piece of beachwood under the sand and the other end popped up, and was not impressed with the fact vehicles are allowed on the beach. Within 15 minutes, she drug Erik back to the truck and begged to get in!Even though Lily was not enthralled with her beach experience, she made up for it by being beautiful! Is this a pretty girl or what?

The kids had a great time playing in the water. They took off running with the pant legs rolled up and enjoyed letting the water swirl around their ankles. You can tell by the lack of coats, that the weather was very nice.

The incoming tide dictated when it was time to head back to the house, we decided getting the truck stuck on the beach is not our idea of fun. On our way back, we drove by this pelican hanging out with the seagulls.

Bowl, Baby, Bowl

Wow! Seth had a great day bowling! During league play, he bowled right around his average -- a 76 and an 82. Then, he wanted to continue bowling by himself while he waited for the other lanes to finish. He bowled an 88, 91 and 115! Typically any games after the third game start to go downhill because he gets tired. But, check this out -- this is his fifth game!

This game would have been way higher, but you can see where he lost the momentum in the 7th frame. He was really on a roll for those first six frames! It would be awesome if he could bowl like this during regionals, I could see him adding a gold medal to his collection. Stay tuned....

Fun at the Beach

We ventured to the beach for Saturday night expecting the weather to be rather drizzly and cool. This picture was taken about 2:00 on Saturday and it was easily shorts and tank top kind of weather.
On Sunday, we had cloudy conditions but it was still quite comfortable. Tenley and Lacey enjoyed riding "the bug".
Lacey insisted on riding this ride, but after it got going, she was not very happy about her decision. DeeDee is definitely thinking twice about it too and Seth is having the time of his life!
Apparently the weather at home was monsooning and downright awful. Looks like we made the right choice!

Nelson's Birthday

The kids and I, along with my co-worker Jennifer and her baby Logan, went to Jill and Shayne's to celebrate Nelson's (Nellie) first birthday. She squealed with delight with every toy that made noise, and sported some pretty good dance moves too. I have never seen a one year old handle the huge crowd and overwhelming stimuli so well; it didn't seem to faze her one bit.

Logan had a great time eating an enormous chocolate cupcake and managed to share the joy by getting chocolate cake and frosting all over his mom and himself!
I tried to talk Seth into eating his cupcake with a fork, but he informed me that he was going to "eat it like a man". He watched Grover eat the cupcake this way, so he figured if Grover could do it, then so could he.
At the end of the party, Nellie showed us how she had the whole birthday thing "in the bag".
Thank you for inviting us to share this day!

Wow!

I had to share what I saw tonight. I was sitting in my chair working on the computer and I looked up and saw this beautiful site! I went and grabbed the camera quickly before it got away from me. What do you think?



Even as brilliant as the colors in these photos appear, the intensity of the colors were ten-fold in real life. I love sunsets! It was worth the mosquito feeding frenzy that occurred on my arms and legs while taking the photos.

Splish, splash, we're having a blast!

The last two days the kids and I have been in Boise playing in the waterpark - Roaring Springs. On Saturday we played for about 7 hours and even though we had sunscreen on, we all got quite burned. I later realized that the sunscreen I was using was water resistant, not waterproof. The temp reached 96 and there we were offering our skin to the UV rays! Needless to say, I bought waterproof sunscreen today and that, along with temps of only 86, made for a much more comfortable day. Here's Seth playing in the spray area, waiting for the bucket to dump:

On Sunday, we met up with some friends we met at the CHASA retreat at the Great Wolf Lodge. This is Maggie and Lacey. Lacey had just come down the blue slide and her hair was pushed over her face. Maggie didn't like this slide but she made Lacey get over her fears of the other slides as you can see in the next picture.
This is Lacey and Maggie as they came down the "family" slide. They were nearly the last people allowed to go down this slide since the park closed at 8:00 and this picture was taken about 7:55. Once Lacey got brave enough to go down the slide, she wanted to do it over and over again. I had predicted this very scenario earlier in the day and sure enough I was right. Thank you Maggie for getting Lacey to do the rides!
There are a couple more pictures on the Picasa site. Unfortunately, I didn't get very many because I was in the water quite a bit. Also, I have hardly any of Seth because he was always with me if I went in the wave pool or lazy river. He had a great time though and has already fallen asleep about 15 minutes into his new movie. I'd say it had something to do with the movie being boring, but if you know Seth, you know he can watch the dumbest movies and think they are totally entertaining, so.....I'm betting it's all the fun he had!