Spooky and Not so Spooky

Lillian and Eric decided that they wanted to decorate the house for Halloween. In addition to the requisite ghosts and bats hanging from the eves. Eric got a giant sheet of paper and some tempra paints and they each decorated one side. Eric painted some spooky images of bats, witches and jack-o-lantern. Lillian decided her side would be fancy with a princess, a queen and a king. Kristen added a finishing touch with a bunch of flowers separating the two halves. We put the whole thing on the fence, the final results were pretty cool.

Halloween Parade

Today was the Halloween parade at Lillian's school. As always, Lillian wanted to dress up as a princess for Halloween, re-using her princess dress from last year and the year before. This year however she sported a tiara instead of her princess hat.

Lillian's Art

As we mentioned in a prior blog post Lillian has taken an interest in perfecting her art skills. She particularly loves to draw princesses, fairies, family portraits and little girls. Here is a sampling of some of her recent creations.

Cidering

It's apple season, and Eric needed a new project. He'd been talking for a while with our neighbor Dan about buying up a bunch of cast-off apples cheap from the farmer's market and pressing them to make hard cider. This weekend we went for it, picking up about 50 lbs. of apples for $20. We then spent more than that renting a grinder and press from the beer store. Add some kid power, and you've got a fun but tiring afternoon, with 3 1/2 gallons of delicious, fresh apple juice to show for it. Once the yeast has had a week or so, we should have hard cider, ready to bottle.

Hiking Again!

Lillian used to go hiking with mommy and daddy all the time.  In fact hiking was one of our favorite activities when Lillian was under 20lbs. But as she started to get heavier and more squierly hiking became a challenge. Recently however she has become more capable of walking (or running) long distances and so going on a two mile hike to hunter's point involving some significant elevation is no problem at all.  

 

 

 

Bowling!

This past weekend we heard that Lillian's friend Ellie was heading out for an evening of bowling with her dad. When we got to the bowling alley we found out that they were offering a Pizza and bowling special that was less expensive than the two games we had originally planned on playing. Lillian was thrilled about the pizza, as she had been complaining earlier that day about the lack of cheese in her diet. Watching Lillian and Ellie bowl was a slow process as neither of them were capable of getting much speed on their throws, but everyone had fun anyway.