Fall

A cool front came through and it feels like fall!

Time to carve the pumpkin.

It was kind of funny, so as soon as we finished cleaning up our front yard, suddenly a bunch of neighbor kids showed up. I think our yard is more welcoming and happy looking now. Or maybe they could just see the yard. i'm not sure what it is, but it's been fun for Stian. He's been playing quite a bit with the two kids in these pictures.

We like it too. It's nice to have someone for him to play with.

Cute Kids

A cute picture Karin took of the kids (after their haircuts):

Visitors!

Kris's family came to visit last weekend for fall break.

We took them downtown and to Beale Street.

We hung out.

That's the tree in our backyard! It's huge!

And we put them to work!

Hmmm, for some reason the only working pictures I have are of Klebo and Stian. And while they did do a lot of work, Brad and Karin definitely did the most, even if I don't have the photo evidence.

I'll do a "before and after" at some point soon. I need to finish painting the front door. But they really cleaned up our front yard. It's an amazing difference.

They trimmed the front trees back, among other things, and now they are perfect for climbing!

Posing in front of some of their handiwork - this is a sneak peak! Hopefully I'll ge the front door the rest of the way painted soon so we can get a proper "after" picture.

The Shell

Tonight was the last free concert on 2012 at the Levitt Shell. The band was Big Chief Juan Pardo and the Mardi Gras Indians. We packed up a picnic dinner and headed over there. It was much fun. The kids loved it. Especially Silje. She was so funny, once the music started she basically stood up and walked down the hill to the stage. Kris followed her. She just had to be down there right in front. He brought her back up to the blanket a couple of times, but each time she'd sit for a minute, get up and walk back down to the stage.

Here's a blurry zoomed in image of the above, so you can see Silje and Kris down there.

She was just bopping and walking around and watching while she was down there. I'm sure their costumes were very intriguing. Stian was pretty intrigued by them too.

Words

Silje is having a little language explosion lately. She doesn't enunciate very well so you wouldn't necessarily recognize some of her words as actual words, but when you spend enough time with her you start to realize what she is saying.

I tried making a list of all of the words she says, I've probably missed a few, but this is what I came up with:

Baby
Belly
Bye
Bike
Bubble
Ball
Balloon
Book
Bottle
Cat
Cracker
Chair
Cheese
Daddy
Dog
Duck
Eye
Eat
Fish
Hat
Hot
Hair
Hand
Knee
Lap
Lollipop (ahem)
Leaf
Mommy
Milk
Nan (her lovey)
Nurse
Shoe
Sock
Spoon
Stian
Wall
Walk

edited to add some more that I forgot:
bath
banana
uh-oh
bird
yeah
more
pea

Her comprehension is amazing though. Stian likes to ask her where things are and see if she knows what they are and can point to them. She is really impressive. She always surprises us and knows way more than we think she will, like "ceiling" and "light" and "floor" and "doorknob". Who knew she knew those words? She also can understand commands, like "Silje, back up" (when she's on her bike and run into a wall and is stuck) or "Silje, go get your baby."

She's also really taken off walking in just the last week. She walks all over the house now. She's never where you left her. She's off wandering and exploring. It's so cute to see her walking. We've been going for walks in the evening to go look at Halloween decorations on our street (there are some really awesome ones the kids like to go look at) and she'll walk down the sidewalk.

Pumpkins!

A cool front came through last night and it was delightfully cool this morning, so we took the kids to the pumpkin patch. Silje was not in the best of moods, she's been kind of grumpy lately, but I think she's getting 5 teeth coming in at once, three of them are molars, so that might explain it. She wasn't terrible at the patch, she just wasn't her normally smiley, happy self, as you'll see in the pictures.

Stian had a good time at the patch though. We didn't get a picture of it, but they had a huge boat shaped wooden play structure that he thought was pretty darn cool.

Silje did love this car. She loved it, loved it, loved it. And was not at all happy when you made her get out of it to go do something else, or because you notice a big, icky spider crawling on it.

Here Silje is so sad because we are leaving, and therefore leaving the car behind. "Bike!" she kept yelling. "Bike!" Poor Silje.