Finally! I remembered to take my camera on an outing! Joseph spent the day on a temple trip w/ the youth in our ward, so the kids and I hit up the park to pass some time with Rebecca & her kids (who was also husbandless for the day). Beautiful beautiful weather!

The tail end of the sunset behind our house.

This monkey LOVES chips and salsa. Even when the salsa is a little spicy. But if it's TOO spicy, she needs a napkin on hand to wipe off her tongue. :) (excuse her nakedness - a rather frequent part of Baby A's 'perfectly ordinary days')

The desk AND hutch AND ottoman are DONE! Dad helped me design and cut wood for the ottoman the week before we moved (I love me a deadline). I love how it turned out! A little stool for non-dangling feet, file storage in the bottom with a shelf for art supplies on top. Perfect!

a few little touches of Halloween around the place (with leftover vinyl lettering from 2 apartments ago)

one more project done! (I actually did this while listening to conference on Saturday.)

We watch most of conference at home over the internet, but we always try to make it to the church building for the Sunday morning session - Baby A was all ready to go. While she waited for the rest of us, she put on K-lady's costume and said, "all ready! go to church!" :)

We got out the Halloween box on Saturday - it kept the kids occupied while we listened to General Conference.

Our wonderful friend Jane invited us for a date night - 4 couples, the wives each made part of the dinner, we plated the food and felt all fancy, and Jane even let us have her daughter for a babysitter. It was so fun! Adult conversation! Interesting and fun people! And a new grand piano in the home of our host just topped it all off - a little after-dinner music was definitely in order. :) I made the menus we stuck at each place setting.

J-boy stayed home from school w/ a sore throat/cold and is having fun w/ this little entourage.

Entropy Point #4 - every snack and meal seems to end the same: a new stain on the carpet (what horrible person thought it was a good idea to carpet every eating area?!)

Entropy Point #3 - cleaning up outside always seems to result in more messes inside - usually deposited right in the front entry. Is it so hard to actually PUT IT AWAY?!

That would be a cowboy hat on top of the fall floral arrangement. At least it matches the color scheme, right?

The next few pictures on the blog are part of a series. I've decided that if I were to name our 'estate' (you know, a'la Anne of Green Gables, Elinor and Marianne of Barton Cottage, Mr. Rochester of Thornfield Hall, Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights), it would be Entropy Point (where things fall apart). I was kind of enthralled with the idea, so here you have it - 4 days of Entropy Point in all its glory.

We decided to sleep in, which meant everyone joined in for Kenpo-X - my favorite workout of the week! :)

The trip that didn't happen - we packed up, (she was wearing pants at one point), loaded the car, reserved a hotel, and were two blocks from home when I heard the recording on the temple voice mail - closed for maintenance for two weeks. I guess we should have made THAT reservation FIRST. We ended up with movie-and-pizza night at home.

I love this sweet dirty little face.

She's big into 'reading' books these days - there are a lot of things to love about 2 years old.

My new favorite tool!!!!!!! (it may be old, but it has a sweet blade on it - HUGE improvement over my $10 mitre-box-and-saw from home depot!)

I love my dad - thanks to mom's suggestion, he threw his 'little' table saw in the back of the truck (underneath the huge double pillowtop mattress), brought along a few older tools for me to inherit (older as in older than me, but still working great - yay!), and helped me build some new custom shelves for a closet. In this picture he's adjusting his darling little router so I could put those finishing touches on a few other projects. I think everyone needs a dad like this.

So clean!  (She didn't have to be ordered to smile for this shot - I took this one w/ my no-flash camera.)

"Come on, K-lady - I want a picture by the sign" "Not ANOTHER picture!" "Yes, another picture - and you're going to smile like you mean it."

Are they not so cute? (Heidi brought her camera - all of these were taken by her - just look at that gorgeous skin! That gorgeous light! I WANT Heidi's camera!)

Birthday party time!  (See that hole in her smile?  She lost that tooth about a week ago - two days before we did our little baptism dress photo shoot.  Her transition-smile makes me smile.)

Dad & Baby A got a turn when the party guests were busy elsewhere...