You may be thinking what do welcome, walking, wings, and werewolves have in common? Well . . . they were our Labor Day.
Welcome~ My cousin Jana and her family are here visiting her husband's family so they came over for breakfast. We had a fun time eating donuts and the kids enjoyed playing together while we got to visit. Thanks for taking the time to come by!
Walking~ Guess who took his first steps today! I was just thinking that it was going to be awhile before Jacob would walk because he won't even walk while holding onto our fingers. I guess I was wrong! We got it on video, but I have to get it off and merge several videos together so hopefully I can post it soon. Yeah for Jacob!
Wings~ We have a family tradition of eating buffalo wings on Labor Day. It all started our first year of marriage when we went to the National Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo, New York for Labor Day weekend while Stephen was in graduate school. Some years we make them at home, but this year it was take-out to the park for a family picnic.
Werewolves~ The park where we had our picnic has a lake with a trail that goes all the way around it. As we started down the trail, it is covered with trees and did look a bit ominous, Benjamin told Stephen "Dad, there are werewolves in this forest." We both started laughing, and he said "No really that sign says 'Don't feed the werewolves.'" We started laughing even harder. The sign really said, "Don't feed the waterfowl." Awesome!
A few months ago during a lesson in Relief Society, there was a lesson about a mother's role in the family. I felt a prick in my heart about things that I needed to be careful of and to literally be a guard for my children and family time. Benjamin had been asking to play soccer, and I just didn't feel good about it. The school schedule here is much later than other places. Benjamin's bus drops him off at 4p.m., which is so late in my opinion yet I don't have much say in it. Because of his later arrival home, our evenings are taken up with sitting as a family for dinner, cleaning up dinner, a few minutes to play, cleaning up the house, and then scriptures and family prayer before the littlest one goes to bed. The soccer options here were two practices during the week sometime between 6 and 7:30 and then a game every Saturday morning. The other hiccup was that Stephen is usually gone one night a week for church meetings and that would necessitate me going alone to practice with the other two kiddos in tow. I just had a sick feeling when I thought about that kind of commitment. 
Here is the little class cheerleader. She kept yelling "Go kids~ Go Benjamin~" in between eating her crackers and raisins.
My sister is in a sewing competition, and she needs your votes this week. The competition is called Project Run and Play and basically the idea is to have designers make new sewing projects each week that fall under a theme. She is under Simple Simon and Co. and she made some awesome pajamas and bathrobe for this week. This is the third week (she won the first week- go check out her Dick and Jane Back to School dress and jacket-) and her project this needs some votes. If you could vote for her pajamas before tonight at midnight, I'd appreciate it. (You can only vote once per IP address so if you have a smart phone and could add another vote that would be great.) Hopefully we can get her through to the next round!
