Beautiful fall day . . .

On a beautiful Sunday in October, we decided to take a few pictures . . .

Jaden

(in his favorite picture-taking spot outside our church)

 Noah with Daddy

 Lael relaxing at home

 And Noah being his sunshiny self!



Fire safety night

We had the opportunity to attend a fire safety night with our homeschool group this past week.  The firefighters at Perseverance Volunteer Fire Station did such a great job!  The kids got to see the equipment on different fire trucks and learned about what situations merited the use of which rescue vehicle.

 You never know when some massive cutters will come in handy!

 Of course, a highlight of any fire station visit has to be climbing into the vehicles . . . pretending to be a firefighter is so much fun!

 

 Trying on the gear of a firefighter really helped Lael know that the clothes are really heavy and HOT!

 Firefighter Jaden hanging out with a new friend!

 The kids saw a firefighter in full gear so they could see (and hear) what they could expect if they ever were in a situation where they needed to be rescued.

In addition to all that, they even got to fight a house fire (okay, so the fire wasn't real, but the hose was)!

Pictures of that to come ;)

It was a great night!

I am extremely behind in my blogging . . . chalk it up to a busy fall! I hope over the next few days to get caught up again -- so that we can share all the fun holiday plans we have!

One major event of the fall that was missing from my blog was our annual fall family vacation. We've gone on vacation in October for the past several years; we love taking a couple of days to get away. Usually we've gone to Ocean City, Maryland in the past, but this year we decided to head to some familiar ground . . . Lancaster County!

One of the places we visited -- Choo Choo Barn! Such a fun field trip! Here are some pictures from that excursion:

Please stay tuned for more from our vacation!

Nature walk

We've had some beautiful fall weather . . . and we wanted to get out and enjoy it! So we headed to one of our city's many wonderful parks for a fall nature walk. The colors of the leaves were just magnificent! As we say at our house, God has been busy with His paintbrush!

While we were walking around, I told Lael and Jaden to look for things that they thought would make good components of a nature collage that we'd be working on at home.We found lots of beautiful things, both small . . .

. . . and not so small!We so enjoyed being out in the fresh air!

As you might expect, Jaden's favorite place was up a tree!

Once we got back home again, they started to work. I didn't give them much in terms of directions except to create a collage using the materials they had collected. Lael decided to make two small collages.
In this one, she used the items she had collected to represent parts of an outdoor scene. Do you see the clouds, birds, trees, flowers, path and grass in her artwork?
This one was more abstract -- but full of color!
Jaden didn't want to be photographed while he was creating his artwork -- he did the JUMBO size collage! (It spans the width of our treadmill to give you some perspective.)We definitely need to do this again soon!