Cousins, Birthdays, Weird Animals & A Surfeit of Pictures

As a disclaimer, I uploaded a ridiculous number of pictures to this post, but couldn't edit it down. Skim it or Skip it!


We've had a great September. Cheyenne is an excellent school girl! I thought she'd be bored with reading and writing after doing it for a couple of hours at school, but that only whets her appetite. She comes home and spends hours writing and drawing. She also plays school, so I get to hear whatever was said at school that day! :-) This week she had her Special Day-- when they get to bring in snack, be the line leader, do the calendar that day, etc. As I watched her straight little back march off down the hall at the head of the line, I realized I was seeing Cheyenne in her element-- Being Important and In Charge. She is VERY good at it! (Evan has several snarky comments about where she might have inherited that, but we ignore him!)


Cheyenne waiting for the muse to strike. She has played outside so great lately. We don't have to have the A/C or the heat on, so the screen doors are all that stand between the kids and the great outdoors. Now, though, we're getting lots of yucky cold rain, announcing it really is thinking about fall.
Dana and Marilyn stopped here on their way west. Cheyenne and Elliott like coloring with Grandma!
Bethaney came down for several days a couple of weeks ago. We had a great time walking Cheyenne to school and letting the kids play together. We also got apples!
Lillian had great fun with some water and apples! We were making applesauce, so we didn't care if they got a little bruised.

Bethaney and I had picked apples last fall (while she was heavily pregnant with Miss Lillian) but we wimped out this year when we pulled into the orchard with four small children. So we bought the pre-picked apples-- still very yummy, and made great applesauce!
Marilla participates in the outdoor life by crawling on the deck. She's crawling great now, able to get anywhere she wants to! She also pulls herself to standing on anything she can, but that leads to problems, since she then doesn't know how to sit down! So lot of bumps and spills.

The kids color after a hard day of playing. Elliott and Orianna are suddenly old enough to play great together. Now Lillian and Marilla are butting heads-- literally! Lily loved patting Marilla's head, but there was often a hard toy in the same hand, so Marilla wasn't impressed!
Cheyenne is a very sleepy little girl by the end of the day. School is hard work!
Last weekend we went up to Mom and Dad's for the weekend. Owen and Ashley were home for a visit, and it was Lily's first birthday! The drive down to Bet's for the party was full of color. What a beautiful place the Adirondacks are!
Nathan was one of the many kids there. He was showing off his walking skills!
Elliott glommed onto Orianna's scooter. It's been a favorite of his since last summer when we first met Orianna in Alaska!

Mr. Cool graced us with his presence.
Cheyenne leaning on the railing of Bet and Justin's amazingly huge porch/balcony. It was a beautiful day, the kids had a great time running around.
Bethaney did NOT hire clowns for Lily's birthday, but she did have the foresight to invite Adrian and Matt-- Traveling Fork Tricksters.
The newlyweds.

I'm not sure how Cody was authorized to wear this shirt...

Dad and Jeff-- I'm sure politics never entered into their discussions.
Lily's not sure what's going on... Lots of people singing!
Lots of kids there! They'll have fun together as they grow up.

Miss Orianna with her party hat.
"Hmm... cake!"




Bethaney had thoughtfully made a seperate, small cake specifically for candle-lighting and frosting-swiping.

Both Katherine...
and Elliott were willing to share, though!
Demonstrating the wonders of the gift bag before getting down to opening presents!
Ashley's birthday is this week, so we had to have a cake for her, too, on Sunday. (She's 22, but we only had one candle in the house!)

Cheyenne begged permission Sunday to "go see how deep the puddles are". I agreed on the condition that she put her pajamas on-- easier to wash than a Sunday dress!
They look clean from this vantage point...
but the legs are a different story!
Grandpa in his glory, with Lily and Elliot.
Owen, happy to be back on the farm for a weekend.

"Okay, Evan, how many pictures are you going to take?"
I think the hood of the truck was a little chilly... or Elliott was just enjoying yelling.
A pretty aunt Tori holding Rilla.
Chubby cheeks!
Ditto, but not quite so adorable.

Cody's latest acquisition, doing battle with Justin's leg. I believe it is the world's smelliest, stupidest billy goat.
It has been known to attack Cody's motorcycle and push it over. In all fairness to Cody, the goat was advertised as a pygmy goat. Cody's had them in the past, and they're great little animals. This goat, however, makes me swear off goat cheese for life.
Another wildlife oddity is this moose calf, just a few miles from Mom and Dad's. It spends lots of time hanging out with Herefords! I guess the moose population really is expanding up north!
Rilla tucking into some whole-grain rice cereal. She is eating pretty well now-- another milestone! Not that it is helping her sleep, though. She is a terrible little baby at night, waking up to eat and fuss pretty frequently. Well worth it, of course, but the money I would be prepared to spend to have an uninterrupted night is climbing steadily!

Growing Up

This week has been so full of growing up moments, I had to pose the kids for some pictures.
The kids performed admirably, of course! :-)
I'm lucky they are all such good little buddies. I hadn't realized how much they do play together, actually, until Cheyenne started school this week. Elliott, while enjoying complete control over all the toys, really is missing Cheyenne.
Rilla with a squinched up nose. She's six months old, as of yesterday.
So we had to take a few quick portraits...


Cheyenne on her first day of school. We were running late (of course) so I didn't have time to pose really good pictures, but the utter poise and responsibility are evident, anyway!
The backpack (cinched up all the way and it still is big on her!)






Cheyenne with her teacher (she's expecting a third child in October, so she'll be out for several months!)




On the same day, Elliott and Cheyenne both had their first dentist appointment. They had their initial checkup, and they normally would have had to schedule a separate visit to have their teeth cleaned, but after the dentist was finished, the assistant said there were two hygienists available, and would I like to have that done right now? I did, and it was nice to get it all done at once, although juggling an antsy baby while holding hands and cajoling kids through X-rays was quite busy!
Elliott was quite enthralled for a long time cleaning the teeth model.






On the SAME day (Yup, it did seem like a long day!), two of our butterflies hatched! Of course, I went upstairs to feed Marilla for ten minutes and by the time we came down again, there they were. So exciting to see them flex their wings and grow. They hatched right before I was supposed to leave for Cheyenne's orientation, so Eleanor babysat Elliott, Marilla AND two caterpillars.

After they'd hung for a while, I moved them outside. Cheyenne had to grudgingly donate some of the sand from the sandbox because the breeze was making a nice little kite out of the container!
The empty shells are so clear and fragile. When they started trying to fly, I helped them crawl onto a leaf, and they were out of sight within seconds. Pretty impressive.

Evan wasn't able to be at Cheyenne's Pre-K for the first day of orientation, so he stayed home the next morning to walk her to school. I didn't know how hard it would be on Daddy to leave his girl there!

Posing with Elliott.
Walking down the road with Daddy.

Very sad, lonely, left-behind boy. I took Marilla and Elliott over in the double stroller later to pick her up. Not sure how often we'll do that, as I have an old garage sale stroller that's sort of tipsy on pavement, let alone on the trails through the woods you have to use to get to school. Anyway, Cheyenne was very happy with school. It is so weird not knowing what's happening with her at all times. There was a show and tell that first day-- Evan and I were saying how much we would pay to be a fly on the wall for that. She took Wodehouse, my wolf puppet from librarian days, and demonstrated how to use a puppet. She did it very competently here, I just wonder if she had the courage to do it at school.

This post has been up on my computer for a day now, interrupted by bedtime, driving to school, frequent nursings, nap attempts, etc., so tenses and timelines are probably weird. Anyway, just wanted to give everyone a glimpse of my big kids!

Last Days of Summer. (Oh, NO!)

I realized this week that I am never cut out for pet ownership. Lisa and Marilyn set up a jar to hatch Monarch butterflies, and the responsibility inherent in this has me in a tizzy. The lone remaining caterpillar had devoured most of the milkweed leaves in the jar this morning, so I slipped on some (pink) rubber boots and drove to a field nearby (in my yellow sleep shorts and orange t-shirt-- fashion maven!) and picked milkweed leaves for it! The caterpillar did show gratitude for my early morning errand by eating a HUGE portion of the leaves right away.
I had no idea the cocoon was so gorgeous. It doesn't even show up well in these pictures, but they are a gorgeous green, with little speckles of gold. I have no idea how they can make something so shiny and delicate. I might be tempted to wear jewelry if they could replicate the look of this! I found a site http://www.geocities.com/wyllz/id177.htm that has beautiful pictures of all the cycles.

I worry about the poor things a lot, but it is utterly fascinating.

One of Elliott's birthday presents was a sandbox. The sand in Elliott's hair every night attests that they are spending lots of time in that!
It just so happened that the best deal we found on a sandbox included a kid's picnic table with umbrella. Cheyenne and Elliott love having snacks on it.
Elliott enjoys his peanut butter sandwich and milk-- with a side of silliness.

Cheyenne is perfecting a summertime talent-- climbing trees!


I don't think I ever had that much physical courage when I was a kid, so I'm impressed!

Grandma and Grandpa White, Mammy and Auntie Lisa stopped here after they left Newry. Cheyenne went to the state fair with Daddy and the Whites, while Mammy stayed home with the baby, Elliott and I. Mammy and Elliott had a marvelous time together-- Mammy baked bread and Elliott made his own little loaves. They actually turned out good, despite the prolonged kneading they received! Then they had a picnic outside, and played on the swings, and generally were good buddies. Mammy even altered some clothes for me! While it was kind of disappointing not to go to the fair, Elliott and Marilla had a much better day here then they would have dragging around the fair.
This weekend, we got to hang out with Grandma Jill and the two girls. Elliott and Grandma Jill both caught up on the news on their laptops! (We are all so excited about the Sarah Palin nomination-- my brother Tyler works with her best friend in Wasilla, and Bethaney has met her-- hard to believe our state is in the spotlight!)
We had missed Tori's birthday, so we used that as an excuse to make a chocolate cake. Here, Elliott sings "Happy Birthday"-- he is singing so well these days!
Cheyenne (who has already sampled the frosting, as you can tell by the dab on her cheek) watches Tori blow out the candles. A big 11!

Elliott's been watching Daddy shaving-- this is a sledgehammer that came with a little construction set he had, but he was very carefully shaving with it today. He didn't miss a single spot on his face. I'm amazed he doesn't have razor burn after the thoroughness of that shave!
Cheyenne and Tori had their usual marvelous time together-- playing with the hand-me-down Little People we are still utterly fascinated with!
Marilla is really creeping around now. We're back to lots of gates in our split level house. (How I would like to meet the architect of such houses in a dark alley someday!) She is able to open the toy cupboards (pictured behind her) open and pull toys out. Great to have a third person adding to toy piles all over the house!

Evan spent Labor Day laboring hard on our basement bedroom. He was able to get a coat of paint on today! It's "straw" and it looked more browny orange on the paint chip, but it came out a pretty unequivocal yellow-- pretty, though! We had picked out a quilt we liked the other day, and matched the paint chip to that. It looks good with the walls, even though the walls aren't exactly how we pictured.

So now we are looking ahead to fall. Cheyenne starts preschool Wednesday. I am not sure how I am going to handle letting my perfect little girl go! While I am excited because she is excited, it is a very mixed time, emotionally. It is just for 2 1/2 hours a day, and I know she will love it, but it just is a whole different phase in our very insular life. I'm sure in a few weeks it will seem like she's always known the other kids, and life will go on.

Miss Marilla will be six months old on Thursday, too! Lots of growth for all my kids!