Owls Love Pumpkins

Happy Halloween, or Owl-o-ween as it's become in our owl obsessed house.   As I may have shared earlier, Matthew was even his favorite type of owl, "heavy".   It was a fight to get him to leave the headband on, and an even bigger task to get him to hold Catherine






Hugs.

And more hugs that look like headlocks:


This boy sure does love his sister.  He however, was not a big fan of the mask so that was delegated to mommy:

I convinced him to put it on a little longer for trick-or-treating and once he got super excited about the treats, he managed to wear it most of the evening!

Next year we'll be able to hand out candy from this fabulous porch:

But for this year since someone was still napping during trick-or-treating downtown, we opted for the mall again.  It's warm, well-lit and the perfect distance for a child whose 4 step path from A to Z often requires 22 steps.   We were also early enough that we were willing to wait in line for our free family photo (which I then snapped a photo of because I'm lazy and our house is in disarray, so the coloring on the original is better.  My crazy eyes however - still just as crazy looking in the original):

Speaking of photos, since I'm on the way to one monster post (that will make up for my 2 weeks hiatus), a few weeks ago we had family pictures taken again by Amy, who took Matthew's one year photos.  We just did a mini-session with her this time, but as always she got some great shots.  She's moved to LA but was back for a weekend so we were so glad we could meet up!  Here's a few screenshots of our proofing gallery, and if you want to look at more, you can go to http://www.amyshertzerphotography.com/proofing and create an account.   The access code is: matthew



I'm not sure what else I've skipped over in the past 2 weeks but here's at least what I found lingering around my camera (well, with the exception of the pictures Matthew took of the inside of my nose.  I'll spare you):
The other weekend we took a short hike around the Wildlife Preserve.  We missed spotting a deer in the river due to our very loud toddler and as always, checked out the ducks.  It's bear suit time for Catherine:

And frog hat time for Matthew:

He spent most of the hiking letting us get ahead, counting down and then running full force to give us hugs.  It's quite possibly the best thing ever:

We also did some splashing (shock!) and the colors were just about perfect, even if the skies and winds weren't.



We finally got around to carving our pumpkins.  Out of sheer exhaustion I lost a baking sheet and 2 pumpkins worth of seeds to absentmindedness.  On the bright side, I didn't burn down the apartment :-)   Matthew's first pumpkin face was a series of 4 vertical dots.  As he drew each one he said "eyes, nose, eyes, mouth".  When I "carved" the tiny dots they didn't pack much punch so I carved his second drawing for him.  I'm calling it an abstract ghost . . . unsurprisingly, he's calling it an owl.

Otherwise, I survived another concert weekend, we all survived our first cold/virus/sinus infections and we managed to progress on our house even with this surprising news from James' company.   Our nanny unfortunately found a position in her field for more hours so finding new childcare's added a new level of excitment to our lives - especially since I'm 2 weeks out from putting on a big work event, then we're headed back east for 2.5 weeks (speaking of that, anyone up for a potluck/get-together the weekend of Nov. 19 in NoVA?) then we come back and close on our house!  We'll share more as its official-official, but as we've shared some of its awesome points (aspens, front porch, kitchen bigger than a postage stamp) here's definitely one of its quirks:

There's a HUGE "landscaped" (and that's a very loose definition) area around the hot tub (which will hopefully be gone) that's filled with these weird "rocks".  I think it's some type of volcanic rock, rounded out and then painted.  Anyway, they're lightweight and a toddler's dream to stick in their pockets and throw but they are also sitting on 6-8 inches of sand which is just, well, weird.  I don't get it at all and I have no idea what we'll do with the space - other than maybe just declare it a toddler exploration area/sand box of awesomeness since it fails as reasonably attractive landscaping in my opinion.
(Oh yeah, and it appears that I only own 1 fall sweater, but I infact own 3.  They are just all a very similar style and in the gray/brown/green family.  I might however be wearing the same sweater in all of these pics because thats just the type of life ebb and flow we've had).
That's all the news thats fit to print in Watson-land.