In the In Between

Around this time of the year I begin going through my pictures from the past 11 or so months (I've culled them down to around 1,500 - which is about 450 more than where I'd like to be).   It's amazing to see how much my monkeys have changed, like back when Catherine still had her baby "mullet":

 And Matthew was only chatting 85% of the time instead of 95% of the time:

When I do this, it's always exciting to flip through the highlights of the year, but I also love the little tidbits tucked inbetween.  Though October got consumed by bookended highlights of a trip to Grandma's and Halloween, there was lots of growth and fun in between.

There was a makeshift tent with our neighbor one afternoon while we blew out the sprinklers and raked leaves:

 And we did some house rearranging so Matthew and Catherine have been running around for weeks measuring things:

Catherine has been very interested in trains recently.  Here she was loading the coal cars very carefully:

 But once she saw me with the camera she got goofy:

 Then she counted for me:

 And hammed it up:

Matthew's been on a building kick and no materials are safe from his imagination!  Here's his take on a giraffe:

And we finally busted out the lego robotics.  Thus far we've created a robot that will back up when it runs into the wall and makes lots of noise.  It pretty much does what our Roomba does, with the exception of vacuuming and the addition of being even more annoying, but the boy sure does love it.  He's playing with the robot, asking to build more or asking to reprogram it pretty much every day.

Among all this fun we've rearranged a bit.  After moving our "formal" dining table around the country and stashing it in odd places for nearly 7 years, we moved it into the dining area.  We also finally snagged some reasonable stools off craigslist for our counter area.  The kids still find it quite the novelty when they get to eat there or read the newspaper of course.

In addition to our big rearrangement, a dear friend came over to help me clean out my office of doom and now it's much easier to get to the craft supplies, so we've been doing a lot of painting and crafting:

 Matthew also made his Christmas list and after he made the first one he made a second one, which I encouraged because it was his first real attempt at representative drawing:

Catherine made one too:

She didn't quite understand the project and when you ask her about it, she says she wants "Robin for Halloween" for Christmas.   Maybe she'll change her mind in the next few weeks :-)