October!

This has been a super crazy month for us! Let's see...our 4th anniversary, Teeny's 3rd birthday, broken laptop, new laptop, painting pumpkins, bumps and bruises, trip to Longview, Pampered Chef shows, teaching Relief Society, General Conference.....the list goes on and on. The pictures are backwards, like always, so here we go! :)

This was just a cute picture of Monster, I thought.

Teeny's purple butterfly cake with candles

Getting ready to blow out the candles

Two candles down

One candle out (I told you they were all messed up...)

All 3 candles out

Singing Happy Birthday

This is me at exactly 20 weeks, and that is my new maternity skirt. I absolutely love it! It is so incredibly comfortable and I don't have to worry about the kids flipping it up too high when they're squirming on my lap at church. It is wonderful!

The kiddos painting their pumpkins that they got to pick out at the apartment office. They had fun and it was FREE! I love getting free stuff and letting the kids have fun!

Monster is getting better at actually painting things, but he still has to taste the paint. Blech! I can't imagine that it tastes very good, but he seems to put the weirdest things in his mouth.

The finished product: painted children. At least they had fun, right? ;)

So we decided to look at some bigger places (3 bedroom) to rent around town. The kids were loving being in empty houses and exploring. At one old house, Teeny was running around, and she didn't see a little 2 inch step. She tripped over it and about 3 feet from the tiny step were actual stairs going up. She ended up hitting her eye on the step. It was swollen and had a little cut on it. This picture was taken a couple hours later when we got home.

You can't really see the cut, but I thought this was a pretty cute picture of my Teeny.

This is a few days after the accident. You can see how the bruise is starting to form. I didn't get a picture of her on Saturday or yesterday, but she looked like she got in a fist fight with someone. Besides the black eye, she got a scratch right across the bridge of her nose where she ran into the computer desk and a swollen lip where she either hit it on something or bit it. She is kind of accident prone, but she gets over her bumps and bruises pretty quickly. She doesn't seem to let them bother her.

Now, about our computer...we had a great laptop that I absolutely loved. About 2 weeks ago, Daddy decided that he needed to do an update on it. He went to the HP website to get the particular update that he wanted. After it went through the whole process, the computer shut down just like it was supposed to. However, when we tried to turn it back on, it didn't work. We tried calling HP since it was their update that broke it, but they said we would have to pay at least $100 to have them look at it. After buying our new laptop, we talked to them again, but this time they said it would cost over $400 to fix it. So, it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Our new laptop is even better, I think. It isn't as powerful as the old one, but it is smaller, lighter and much more portable than the old one. It's an Acer Aspire 1410. It's 10.6 inches and weighs 3 pounds. I have a stretchy pink case for it that fits in my diaper bag or catalog tote. It even runs on Windows 7. I love it! I think it is just perfect for me. We wouldn't have bought one so quickly, but since my Pampered Chef business has picked up, I needed to be able to get to my shows and submit orders. So, we'll be using it as a business expense since I'll be using it most of the time.

I taught in Relief Society this past week. I really enjoyed the lesson this month. It was on dealing with changes in our lives. I don't think that I did much to make the lesson successful, but the sisters really participated a lot. I think they really brought the Spirit into it. I still really enjoy teaching, but sometimes I feel like I'm just fumbling through everything. This week kind of restored my confidence and helped me remember that I'm not really the one teaching--the Spirit is.

I enjoyed General Conference at the beginning of the month. I don't remember the talks at all, but it is hard for me to remember and sometimes even pay attention with the 2 little ones. I try to find things for them to do while we watch. But Monster is still so small that he doesn't really care. Teeny knows who the prophet is and can listen for certain key words. We even had her looking at pictures of the general authorities and trying to pick out who was speaking. She did pretty good, but that only lasts for so long. I'm going to try to have coloring pages for them in April. I'm open for other suggestions if anyone has them.

We didn't get to do anything for our anniversary. Daddy ended up working late that night. The weekend before we went to Longview to get new tires put on the van, and the weekend after was Te eny'sbirthday. I'm hoping that since next year is our 5 year anniversary, we'll get to do something fun. But, we'll see.

Now that I've written a novel and pretty much caught us up, I guess I'll go. I'll probably post again later this week since we carved our pumpkin for FHE tonight and we have a ward party on Halloween that we're going to take the kids to.