this just means winter is right around the corner

it's fall time here in michigan which means only one thing. winter is coming. and we're not looking forward to it. but before winter comes there is raking to do. hayden has been asking me for weeks now if there are enough leaves on the ground to make a big pile. finally, there were. so after his bowling league on thursday, jessica, justin, hayden, talan and i all went outside to rake and play in the leaves. justin had never raked leaves before as he lives in florida. i'm sure it's the most exciting thing he's ever done. it was great to have someone to help me out. thanks for the help, justin! i can't wait to have you come over and shovel my driveway and scrape my car off this winter!

i think justin was asking hayden "what the heck is this thing?":
so hayden demonstrated what to do. although, for whatever reason, he thought the best place to make a big leaf pile to jump in was on the concrete:
ahhh. he gets it now:
jessica helped too. she made sure talan and dante were well taken care of:
talan's first fall. autumn i mean, not as in falling over:

hayden liked to eat the leaves his first year too. it's like a family tradition:

the piles were formed and the fun began:




he was not so happy to find out we had to bag the leaves for the compost man that was coming the next morning. we told him we would put him in the bag and the compost man would come and get him. the threat didn't work. he begged us to let him sleep out there in the bag. "i'll stay warm in the bag" he told us. i thought about it, but for whatever reason, decided against it:
and now, 4 days later, we have a bunch of new leaves to rake. maybe tomorrow....justin, whatcha up to tomorrow?!

the "pumpkin patch"

we waited to go get our pumpkins until jessica came home. so on monday, after a big family dinner, we all headed out to pick out our pumpkins. the past several years dave and i have gone to basically this house that sits on 8 mile. the front yard has pumpkins spread out all over and they have all those blow up halloween decorations. so it's not really a pumpkin patch, but it's also not picking a pumpkin out of a box at meijer either. i'm not sure how happy the employees would be at meijer is i stuck both of my kids in the box filled with pumpkins for some photographs.
so anyway. they didn't have super big pumpkins so we got the biggest one we could find hoping that we'll be able to shove talan in it for a few pictures once we have it all scooped out. hey, hayden had to do it, now it's talan's turn.
hayden, once again, was terrible about getting his picture taken. he was too busy running from dancing decoration to spinning bats inside a globe decoration to giant blow up pumpkin decorations. i did manage to get a couple though. at one point he just said "but i'm tired of getting my picture taken." you think he'd be used to it by now.
the carving will commence on monday evening. so expect to see pictures shortly after that. for now, here's pictures of the great pumpkin patch on 8 mile.

hayden refused to sit next to them:
at least i have one that will cooperate with the camera:

look! actually a picture with hayden in it:
rainah and talan:
talan looks like he has the vampire hair going on in this picture:
they both pretty much have the same look on their face:

hayden just wanted to play with all the decorations. something we have to do whenever we go to target. he has to push EVERY button in the halloween isle:
this was the best i got:

finally, life will be back to normal

we have been counting down the days until jessica came home from haiti since she left back in early may. hayden and grandma made a chain and hayden would rip one off every morning and get all excited about how few days were left.
jessica's flight got back to michigan at 10:05pm on sunday evening. we all had told jessica that jenn would be coming in from grand rapids on monday and i would come over to the house with the boys after hayden got done with school. instead, we all decided to surprise her and show up to the airport. mom and dad waited for her at the gate as we all hid around the corner. we had hayden run up behind her to give her a hug as we all followed behind him. i tried to take some pictures but they turned out pretty dark and grainy. i'll probably keep them forever for myself, but they just weren't worth posting. she was so surprised to see us all and we were all so happy to be able to just hug her once again.
hayden skipped school on monday and we all hung out at mom and dad's house with jessica all day long. we saw some of her many pictures and heard a few stories. it really is inspiring to see everything she did for those people. i know that they will all miss her, but we certainly are glad to have her back home.
i'm so excited to have life back to normal again. i can't wait for catan nites with jessica now involved and to see her once again just falling asleep on my couch when we have nothing to do. and i'm most excited that the boys have her back in their lives.
welcome home, jessica. you will never know just how much we really missed you.

minutes before running out to jump in jessica's arms. this is the card hayden made for jessica:
getting to see the babies for the first time since they were 1 and 4 months old:


this is more like it:

super bowl

friday nite ledco had a bowling nite to say goodbye to a fellow co-worker who was leaving. i brought the boys up so we could all get our bowl on again. i realized that i really wish hayden didn't have bumpers in the league that he's in on thursday's. it took him a little bit to warm up, but by the end he was bowling better than several of the adults. i'm putting him on the bowling circuit soon. talan just hung out and was passed back and forth between people and eventually he just fell asleep in his car seat.

what form:
and again i say, what form:
if the ball went in the gutter he'd turn around and yell "ahhh, come on!" it's scary how much like me he is:
when he'd knock a bunch of pins down he did this intimidation dance that i can't even describe. he stuck his lips out like in the picture, he did this crazy "come and get it" type gesture with his hands and he moved sideways in a circle like a crab. he had everyone laughing until he milked it a little too long like he usually does:
end of the nite scores. we prepaid till 8pm so we weren't able to finish out the game. had hayden closed one of his next frames he would have gotten over 100. i wasn't doing to shabby myself:

fun in the tub

tonite was bath nite in the skiver house. dave usually takes care of hayden and i take care of talan. the past several times i have said, yeah, we probably won't be able to bathe talan in the sink anymore, and tonite was definitely the last time for that. he likes to just put himself up with the help of the faucet and knobs and sprayer and at times it looks like he is about to pull himself completely out. not to mention the splashing this kid does. the kitchen was soaked. so i guess from now on he'll be in the little tub placed in the big tub, or perhaps he's even ready to move into the bath spinning seat. most of these pictures didn't come out so great because of the all splashing he was doing. so there were lots of unfocused ones. this is basically what he did the whole time:



while i was taking pictures of talan dave ran in and said "where's the camera? can i use it?" so i handed it off and he showed me what they were doing in the bathroom. please know that hayden did not pee in the water. it was simply a crayola color tablet. we limited him to one color tonite vs. the 7 colors he used the other week which made the water look black:

cotton pickin' apples

yes, it seems a little early for apple picking, but that's just what we did on friday. it was opening day for the honey crisp apples so that's the day we go. although, come to find out, mom doesn't really care about the honey crisp or the empire apples so she'll be going again in another couple of weeks. it was a family tradition growing up. we'd go to erwin's orchard, pick apples, get donuts, go home and eat high rise apple pancakes that my mom would make for dinner that nite. since hayden was born the tradition has continued. i've been with him every since he was 8 months old. this year myself, hayden, talan, jenn, rainah, mom and dad all went.
they open at 9am so we got there a little before 9. there was a huge line. i hope somebody told these people that honey crisp were apples, not the cereal. anyway. after standing in line for about 20 minutes we were told that the honey crisp crop was small this year and by the time we got out there, they might be gone. wonderful. we stood in line for probably a little over a half an hour and then took the tractor ride out the the orchard. we each probably got less than half a bag of the honey crisp and then we headed over to pick some empires. as we were finishing, dad looked up and said the rain was moving in. we waited for the tractor and shortly before it got to us the rain started coming. i had a plastic rain cover for the stroller talan was in and dad covered rainah the best he could. it pretty much started pouring and the driver decided to make every stop and wait for people to mosey on and off before taking off for the next stop. oh well. last year it was cold and rainy. what's a little rain ever hurt?
we make it back and then wait in another line for about a half hour to get our donuts. we get to the front and are then informed they sold out of the sugar ones. so we got to wait another 10 minutes until they were done. by that point, the rain had stopped and the people had all left.
rainah really enjoyed her apple and i wondered how in the world hayden ever ate his his first year since he didn't even have any teeth at that point. talan posed for a picture but he didn't really eat it. he just got to suck on the pesticides that were on it.




hayden actually helped quite a bit this year. he would pick the apples:
and place them in the bag if they were good:
or do this if they were bad:
everybody loves to eat apples:


talan and papa before the rain started to fall:
the sky isn't looking so good:
showing off what we picked before the rain came down and the cameras were put away: