A little bit of bragging

I’d like to take this opportunity to do a little bragging while catching up on my Photos-of-the-day.
October 7: My beautiful Katsura tree in the fall, with the morning sun streaming down. We have 3 of these trees and we LOVE them.
Is that gorgeous or what?
October 9: Sarah helped paint some sets for her 6th grade musical. She did a great job! And thanks to my dad for building “The Doors.”

October 11: I baked chocolate chip cookies. I used my mom’s recipe. I did everything the same as I always do. Mine are never as good as hers. My mom is the queen of chocolate chip cookies. Except this time, THIS time, my daughters said the cookies were (should I shout this or whisper it?) better than grandma’s. Whoa.

October 12: We had some gorgeous mornings here before the rains started. We pass by these trees every morning on the way to the bus stop. I just had to take a picture. The colors actually got more vibrant as the days passed, and now it’s raining and blowing and I doubt there are any leaves left, but I loved the fog the day I took this shot.

October 13: I’ve done a little fall decorating with the pumpkins and other treasures I found in the “Fall Box.” The porch looks cute this year.

October 14: I finished up the little baby book for our new niece. So cute.
   Just one of my favorite pages. All Reese’s lovely mama has to do is add pictures and they’ve got a cute little baby-sized mini-book of Reese’s first year.
October 15: Hydrangeas are one of my favorite flowers. I know I’ve said that before. My purple & blue & pink flowers have dried into this luscious raspberry color for fall. I can’t get over the colors around this fall. God must have used all 128 crayons this year. ;)

October 16: FINALLY! Elise finally wrote her entire name all by herself! Woo-hoo! Way to go, 3-year-old!

October 17: Saturday was one productive day around our house. Bethany worked hard on her leaf collection for school. It’s not done yet, but she made some major progress.
 
Ed also installed our new faucet in the kitchen. The previous one was broken, plus for some reason had practically zero water pressure. So, we bought a really, really, nice one (as in, expensive) and it was almost a breeze to install and it is super and beautiful and not broken and we now have awesome water pressure! Kitchen faucets with no water pressure make it really a pain to wash dishes, let Ed tell you (if you want).

October 18: We skipped church this morning because Sarah was running a fever last night and had a cough and sore throat. She’s quite a lot better today, thankfully, and her fever has been gone since 9:00 a.m. Ed did go to church long enough to sing in choir, but then came home. A no-church day, combined with an off-lunch day, makes for a very different Sunday than we are used to. We had an early lunch, then all headed outside to rake up some leaves and work on the yard together. Not everything is done, but we had a good time working for an hour or so and now the girls are playing, Ed’s watching football, and I’m catching up on my blog. Here are a few pictures I took after we raked up the leaves and then the girls got to have fun in them. Notice how there aren’t very many leaves? Another beauty of the Katsura tree – tiny little leaves.

   (That’s where I was wishing I could turn down the brightness outside like I can in Photoshop so that they would stop squinting their eyes.)

 


Update: after I posted this, I noticed Sarah was back in the house from playing outside. She looked a little pale. I took her temp - back up over 100. :( She's staying home tomorrow, I guess.