fall is almost over!

somehow fall has come and almost gone. 

winter is right around the corner and 

I.am.terrified.

so for now, we will soak up as much time outside as we still can.

our trees have gone through quite the transformation over the past few weeks.

and my favorite one, our Japanese maple, has lost its leaves completely too. but it sure was brilliant for a little while!

every day jack runs home from the bus, gives me and Owen hugs, throws down his backpack, grabs his bow and is out the door again.

his groupings are getting better and better and he shot a 142 out of 150 last week that he was pretty proud of.

I bought a turtleneck. 

never thought id say those words.

Chris was on call the other night and he asked us to come for a quick visit! at this hospital, call shifts are in house and they are 24 hours. so he sleeps there and is home a little after 7 am. once the new year rolls around, he will no longer have call shifts, weekends, or holidays thanks to the new OB unit they are putting in place. its been good for him to refresh his OB skills, but the whole reason we took this job was for the no nights, no holidays, no weekends that will start in January. what a huge blessing that will be!

but back to the night of our visit!

after the visit and the kids were in bed, I thought I heard one of the kids sneaking halloween candy. I went to check it out and figure out which of the kids it was, expecting to find Owen, but no one was there. I figured maybe I was hearing branches rustling on our windows. after watching tv for a while, I decided to go to bed and as I was walking into my closet I saw something out of the corner of my eye. it was too big to be a spider and I figured it was just a shadow or something but decided to look under my bed just in case. I shined my flashlight under there and sure enough, two eyes were looking back at me. 

it was a mouse. 

gag! 

after much hysteria and a couple hours of trying to catch it with sticky traps (all we had on hand), I decided to barricade that sucker in my bedroom until Chris got home the next morning with some traps. I stuffed the gaps in the doorway with washcloths and slept on the couch. it was a long night.

the next morning Chris put traps all over and we waited for a while, not expecting to catch it because mice are nocturnal. after a few hours Chris had had enough of our room being barricaded, so he went in to the battle zone and hunted down the mouse.

VICTORY!

he found it under a dresser, chucked a bat at it which stunned it a bit and then stuck it on a sticky trap that was next to it. then he took it outside and finished the job.

I can't express how gross that little thing made me feel. I've never experienced a mouse in my home before and I hope to never again because I felt so dirty in our house. luckily, Chris spent a couple hours in our room and bathroom disinfecting and cleaning. we washed all our bedding and towels and hopefully got rid of any rodent residue. 

yuck, yuck, yuck.

ANYWAYS...

this handsome boy took another step into manhood last Friday, the 9th

he has braces for the next 18 months.

boy oh boy has he been sore! learning how to eat and brush and floss has been pretty frustrating for him, and who am I kidding, me and Chris too. luckily we just got a Waterpik and some flossers for orthodontia and last night things went much better. it'll take time, but jack has definitely had a roller coaster of emotions since Friday! 

he also gave the lesson in his deacon's quorum. it was on self reliance and he said it went fine and didn't say much more, despite all my questions ha!

last Saturday was the first Saturday in a while that we haven't had a bunch of stuff going on. it was splendid! we decided to check out the annual Granville Chili Cook Off. Chris and Ellie paid to sample all the entries and then cast their votes. 

Ellie loves chili. Ellie = chili. Ellie + chili = bff. 

the rest of us checked everything out, played tag in the yard, then decided to camp out in the van because we were cold and didn't feel like sampling a dozen types of chili. but it was a fun event and I hope Chris enters next year!

when we got home the kids decided to make a ginormous leaf pile in the yard and had so much fun together doing it. i'll be honest, our kids don't get along very often. they might play with one sibling here or there, but they don't usually spend a solid block of time all playing together very often. im always a bit jealous when I see other families that play so well together. so to see them out there playing together was pretty cool (I'm not saying there wasn't arguing here or there because there certainly was).

it started out with jack and Ellie and then slowly Owen then Charlie joined in.

they ended up forming the pile into the shape of a giant nest and pretended to be birds for a while. it was a fun afternoon! 

we chopped up and bagged 8 more bags of leaves for FHE last night, thanks to the kids big pile :) that's 16 total that we did the past few weeks and if each of those bags is truly equivalent to 16 bags of whole leaves, that would've been 256 bags of leaves!!! and there are still more in the yard haha!