Watkinsville Scarecrow 5K and Fall Festival

It's our yearly tradition to participate in the race and fall festival. This year I ran the race and James tucked the kids snuggly in the stroller to watch. Don't the look cozy? Doesn't it look cold? It was at first.I was happy with my time--28:47, as you can see. Slowly but surely I'm am getting a little bit faster. Woo hoo! Our good friends Brett and Alyson and their son Will did the races too. They all got amazing times.

Here is Henry, getting ready to start the kids 1 miles fun run. You see those clenched fists and that tense posture getting ready to run? Henry took this race very seriously. We "practiced" for it a few times ahead of time and he was very determined to be a fast runner and do his best.

Here he is at the end, holding his little finisher's ribbon. He ran the whole time without stopping and finished the race in 12:10. I was very impressed by his determination! He loves running. The highlight for him was finishing before James, who ran it with him. All he could say was, "I was faster than my dad!"

Here are the boys on a tractor from the hay rides in their lovely matching overalls. We didn't get any other pictures of the festival, but we did the usual--funnel cakes and shish kabobs, looking through the rock collectors' booth and all the craft booths and riding the pony and playing in the corn crib at the petting zoo. It was fun hanging out and we saw lots of friends there too. Good old Watkinsville. We sure will miss it.

Happy Birthday Little Wes!

We had a really fun time celebrating Wes's 2nd birthday. It was so fun to see him finally begin to catch on to the significance of the day. He just beamed at us and soaked it all up as we sang, "Happy Birthday" to him. Wesley is such an awesome, fun, intelligent, sweet little kid. He and I have always had a very close attachment from the time he was born (not always by my own choice), but he's always been my little snuggle-buddy, joined at the hip.

A few of his nicknames include the Wesinator, Troublemaker, and Little Wes, and we have a special song we sing about him to the tune of the William Tell Overture. It's hard to imagine life before Wesley. He's so adorable and so opinionated and affectionate. We sure love you, Little Wes!

We camped in our back yard for Wesley's birthday. Here you can kind of see the wilty streamers and balloons that we had up in the tent and which weren't handling the humidity very well. Sleeping next to our kids all night in the tent is always an adventure--being steamrolled by them all night, the hard ground in spite of many layers of bedding, the howling coyotes (where am I, back in Wyoming?), and the gigantic daddy-longlegs crawling all over the outside of the tent like they own the place.

It is actually fun though. We always watch a movie on James's Mac and we get all the pleasures of camping without tons of work or nasty port-a-potties.

The cake of course had to be something to do with jets. I'm not sure any obsession my boys have had yet compares with their current infatuation with rockets and jets. And try as I may, this is as fancy as my cakes get. But that's probably ok because probably about 5 minutes later, while my back was turned, both boys starting licking the sides of the cake and sucking off all the frosting. Oh well, you're only a kid once!