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October was so fun and busy! The first weekend was General Conference, which we so enjoyed! There was an especially exciting announcement this time: young men may now be called to serve missions after they complete high school, or turn 18 years old, and young women may be called at 19 years old. It's so exciting to be living during these important times of growth for the church!
That weekend we also visited a small pumpkin patch, as pictured above, and feasted on Grandma Wright's famous cinnamon rolls, as pictured below. Delicious!
The picture below is of my attempt to make cooking easier. It involved buying all the produce for the week, chopping it up all at once, and separating the ingredients into their respective bags, to be pulled out of the refrigerator on the day they were needed and quickly whipped up into meals. Alas, the effort to chop everything at once wore me down after only the second try, and I'm back to just doing all the meal-making on the day of the actual meal. I still think it was such a great idea though!
Here's Peter out playing for one of the last times with his little friend Addie. She and her family just moved to Japan, and everybody around here misses them! She was definitely a bright ray of sunshine among the kids.
Here I was trying to capture Peter playing peek-a-boo with me by emerging from behind the towels again and again. So cute!
For Halloween this year we got hold of some boxes and spray paint and fashioned cars for all of us to wear as our costumes. Not just any cars, of course. Peter was Lightning McQueen, Luke was Mater, and I was Mater's love interest, Holly Shiftwell, from the second movie. Luke took on the project of making the cars, so of course they turned out fantastic! They were certainly a big hit with all the little kids at our ward Halloween party. Awesomely, I do not currently have a picture of us in our costumes. Luke may have some on his phone, so hopefully I'll remember to get it and put them on here.
Here is Peter playing in one of the boxes.
Earlier in the month we had our annual Halloween party with Luke's family at his sister Sarah's house, where we carved pumpkins, had a pie-eating contest among the kids and adults, and a donut eating contest. So fun! I carved a haunted house, pictured on the left, and Luke did the ghost on the inside of the pumpkin.
Halloween was also the day we found out we're having a boy! It's going to be so perfect for Peter to have a little brother. It will also be so perfect that our baby will have a cousin just a few short weeks older than him in the Caleb and Lauren Perkins family! And his cousin Silas on the Wright side will only be a year older. Perfect, perfect, perfect!
Near the beginning of November Peter's friend Isaac (pictured below on the right in the green t-shirt) turned three and invited all the neighbor kids to his birthday! The kids shot off a faulty rocket (it only actually shot into the air every three or four tries), played "pin the horn on the dinosaur" and ate an awesome lava cake with ice cream. The cake was so cool! Isaac's mom mixed red cake mix (red velvet?) with chocolate for the actual cake part, frosted it with chocolate frosting and some red frosting dribbling from the center. In the center she cut out a hole big enough for a small plastic cup to be put down in, then put dry ice and water in the cup so that it frothed out and looked like the cake was an actual smoking mountain! Brilliant! Thought of it all on her own, too, which I was especially impressed with since I tend to get most of my "creative" ideas from books, magazines, pinterest, etc. Despite the incredibly cool nature of the cake, Peter hardly touched it, far preferring the excellent vanilla ice cream. It's pretty much ice cream or nothing for that boy.
Also at the beginning of November I launched a book club in our ward. I am so excited about it! We're starting off by reading The Happiness Project by Gretchin Rubin, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Our first meeting to actually talk about what we read is tonight. Wish me luck!
At any rate, having started the club, I've been trying to get a few minutes of reading in each night while Luke is reading to Peter. Sometimes (all the time) I have a hard time putting my book down though, and Luke and Peter have to come remind me it's time for prayer and bed. Here is Peter, giving me his version of a scalp massage as he and daddy try to distract me away from my reading. :)
This fall has been beyond beautiful, and we've been able to get outside with the other neighbor kids a lot and play! Here was the last day the kids could play in the leaves before the blowers came and cleaned them up. And not a moment too soon, as the big snowstorm came that very weekend!
Here is Peter enjoying his toast while luxuriating in the playhouse.
Last, a beautiful picture of our beautiful boy, taken by Addie's mom, Rui. Miss those guys!
