Carving Pumpkins

We carved pumpkins on Friday night and then had a family movie. We all enjoyed seeing our creations and Daddy and Grace did a great job carving the faces out.

The Pumpkin Patch

The view while we were out pumpkin hunting!


We went tonight to go get pumpkins. I think that it being 90 degrees at 7pm made it a surreal adventure. But the kids still had fun. Although they missed being in the "real pumpkin field" and picking the pumpkins there and the hay ride. We did that last year. I am not sure that they even do those things down here. I think it is to warm for pumpkins to grow down here. Anyway, this is the closest to Halloween we have ever gotten our pumpkins and we are not even going to carve them until Friday night!

Circle B Reserve

We have this great nature reserve right here in Lakeland. So we took the kids on Sunday afternoon. We went on a 2 mile hike and saw so many cool things. There were alligators in the lake and marsh every where! Beautiful, huge birds, bald eagles, and spiders as big as a DVD hanging in the trees! We were almost done with our hike and were walking on a path through the marsh and Noel was walking in front of me. He starts prancing around yelling "snake, snake" and sure enough a 3 foot snake was making its way across the path in front of us. We all started laughing. I guess we have become accustomed to snakes. Since we were not really scared. Or maybe it was that we had just walked down a path that had 6 foot alligators laying next to them!
I still have a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that we live in a place that has palm trees everywhere.
A real alligator 5 feet from me!
Huge alligator in the lake!

Cute Ella

Ok so I know I have a lot of pictures of Ella but she is just so darn cute at times. I love the top picture of her but I especially love the bottom for a few reasons. 1. It is funny that she chose to wear this bandanna this way. I showed her the correct way but of course she wanted to wear it the way she thought best. 2. Besides reminding me of Guns -N- Roses it also reminds me of my brother when he was in kindergarten. He would sneak this funny Ghost Busters bandanna into his bag (along with some ratty play clothes) and then put it all on when he got to school. So I still have visions of my sweet little brother with a crazy, funny bandanna on his blonde little head. And now my sweet little girl has done the same thing!

Princess Ella

Ella loves to dress up and her new thing is to find a dress that she can spin around in. So we found this great costume for Halloween and she spins and spins then falls down and giggles like crazy.


Ella also likes to wear dresses to Sunday School. She particularly likes this dress.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

We finally took a long family vacation at the end of September. When we rented the condo we thought that Myrtle Beach was only 6 hours away, we later found out it was 9 hours. Oh well, we have not had a good long drive for awhile:) It was a great vacation. We played in the pools and on the beach of course. We ate at many local restaurants and enjoyed exploring a new place. The kids always love travelling and we enjoy taking them places. The weather was actually cool and that was a nice break from the Florida heat. We decided next year we will go to Hilton Head Island it is 3 hours closer but still a new place.

Noel said, "Mom, take this picture of me and then send it to my Papa John and tell him I caught a big octopus!" He thought it was so funny.

We found this awesome candy store. It was huge. You could make your own candy bar. We walked all around the store and picked out any candy we wanted and then they put it together into this HUGE chocolate bar! They loved it, especially since we are not big candy eaters. But hey we were on vacation!

This was the first time our kids have ever played mini golf. We found this really cool place that was like a castle.

Hammocks at the resort

Yes, I did let my kids have soda on vacation! Not typical but hey we were on vacation!

Playing at the pool
Playing at the beach