Sweet Laurel

Laurel is the sweetest little thing.  She's a very smiley and content baby.  She lights up whenever we talk to her and she often tries to jabber back.  I took these pictures within the last week or so; she's four months old now.

We hold her sitting up a lot; she loves it.

Good morning!

Her eyes are so blue.

Check out this picture of Annie in the same outfit.  It's a 12 month outfit, and she was ten months old.  Laurel is growing fast!

I really love playing dress up with my real live baby doll.

I had the girls trying on options for our upcoming family pictures.  (Ignore the bedhead.)

First Snow Day

The first snow day is always so fun!  This one was a nice deep snow and it stuck around for several days.  The kids played in it several times each day.

November Family Time

I came downstairs one day to see the kids looking for Boggle words with Jim.  I love that he can cuddle four kids at once.

Abby was nearby too.

Annie caught onto the fact that I was taking pictures, so she pulled out the drama.

Alex loves sweet corn.

We often play a family game on Sunday evenings.

These kids were excited to see how Laurel liked the Bumbo seat.

It didn't take me long to shop for more books after buying my new shelves.  :)  This was a fantastic haul from the library's used bookshop!

This kid is such a ham.

So happy together.

Cute Abby

We took another little trip up to Minneapolis one day so Jim and I could attend the temple there.  While Jim did a session, the kids and I checked out the free zoo and conservatory.  Afterwards, I attended a session and Jim took the kids to the park.  The weather was quite nice, and we had a fabulous day!

I think this was actually in October, but I took the kids to a local pumpkin farm one day.  They had so many fun things for us to do including corn mazes, haunted houses, and lots of outdoor kids' activities.  We spent all day there and Laurel was a trooper.

They loved the jumping pillow.

Abby had so much fun.

These goats were hilarious. You could buy food and then use this conveyor belt to send it up to the goats.

Another day (possibly in October) we had a tour of a local dairy.  They took us around to see the cows, the dairy production/ processing, and even their kangaroos.  The tour ended with ice cream.

We visited our community's STEM festival one evening.  Logan was participating in a display with his Lego League, so I took the other kids around for the activities.  On the way over, Alex was running and tripped landing head first on the concrete sidewalk. I thought we were heading for the ER for sure.  Surprisingly, he just had a little scrape.  We found the first aid station immediately and then went on to enjoy the evening. 

The reptiles were a huge hit.

Child Photographers

The kids, Alex in particular, have been very into taking pictures lately.  We keep finding random pictures.

Where did he learn the duck face??

All of the rest were taken by Alex.  He's pretty obsessed with taking photos.  We're thinking about getting him his own camera.

I love that he dated this one!

Impromtu Photo Shoot

One day in November Alex asked, "Mom can you take a picture with me?"  So I turned on the camera to figure out how to take a selfie.  Alex was the one that figured it out.  Ha ha!

Logan was upstairs reading, the two little girls were napping, and the house was fairly clean so I was more relaxed than usual.  One thing led to another, and the three of us had quite the fun time taking pictures.

We discovered that the camera had some interesting options.

It even takes panorama shots!  It's pretty disorienting to take a full 360 picture. 

Much better.

Moving on...and these two got silly.

These faces are so funny.

I love this one.

Another hilarious face.