Happy Halloween

Here they are, ready for trick-or-treating.

On Saturday, we went to a little Halloween festival.

This year, I didn't sew anything, but used lots of hot glue for the monster, cupcake, and mummy. Olivia was a witch a couple years ago, but just wanted to add a green face and gray hair this time.

My little mummy.

Candy People

My VT brought us little candy guys - our whole family of them. I like pictures with all 4 of my kids. That little guy is getting big already - he's a 2-month chunk!

Baby Ironman

My baby:

Her baby:

Yes, we do have baby dolls at our house. But she's adopted IronMan to be her baby. She takes good care of him - carries him around, burps him, wraps a blanket around him and sometimes sings to him (at least when her brother's not home to take him back). Her baby talks back to her in a deep, kinda-scary-robot voice.

Hello, World!

Arriving a week ahead of schedule . . .

Tyler Johnny Knippers

August 22nd

7 lb 4 oz

Brothers!

Two White Dresses

My aunt Becky makes white dresses. Hand-smocked pretty dresses. It's kind of a tradition for us - she made my blessing and baptism dress, and all my sisters, cousins, etc. She made Olivia and Katelyn's blessing dresses. So we couldn't wait to see the baptism dress she was making for Olivia. Then, Grandma Knippers called to see if she could make a special baptism dress for her. We ended up having two beautiful dresses! She got to wear one into the water to be baptized in, and came out and changed into the other one for afterwards. She's a lucky girl to get to have two!

I was a little worried the day of the baptism (needed to hurry and get desk moved in, computer set up, find printer, so we could print the programs . . . make sure we could find her white shoes, etc.). But once we got to the church, everything felt peaceful and fell into place. My mom wrote a poem about baptism for her that I want to share on here, but a couple people told her she needs to publish it so I won't put it here.

Below: All the family members that were able to be there with us. My bro-in-law told me I needed to duct tape my belly button down - you can probably see it's protrusion.

After posing for pictures, these two were trying out the "spinniness" of their dresses from Great-Grandma Knippers.

Such an exciting, happy day!

Moving Day

Our house had some work done on it before we could move in. So it looked like this for a while. It was finally ready to move in - the day before Olivia's big day. We needed to get moved in (or more, we needed to get moved out of our rental), and start getting settled in before time for baby to come. But I didn't want Olivia's baptism day to be spent in moving chaos, and be too busy with that to be able to focus on her and the baptism! Somehow, it all worked out - it was so fun to have everyone with us for the weekend, the baptism went beautifully, and I made it through without going into labor. But not without being told plenty of times not to do anything - like I could just sit and watch with so much to do!

We moved into a house just a few houses down from where we were. The elders quorum helped us move most of our stuff Friday night, but there was still some left on Saturday for family to help with. Here they are carrying our trampoline down the street.

First Day

After a whirlwind summer, we're back to school here. I felt like I hardly had time to think about sending my second one away to kindergarten before it happened. But he was ready and we gave him a little extra time so he'll be one of the older ones in his grade instead of the youngest. They just have half-day K here, which I love - and so does he!

On the first day, Jackson went right into class and started playing, not even looking back! I'm glad he didn't have a hard time with it - but the first day of school always make his mom a little sad!

All at Once

Moving today.

Baptism tomorrow.

School starts in 5 days.

Baby due in 3 weeks.

The plan was to move in 3 weeks ago but it kept getting pushed back. Now the house is finally ready, and we need to be out as soon as possible. It happens to be Olivia's baptism weekend! Lots of family coming for the day tomorrow to be here for the baptism, some for the weekend. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

I've got a few things to do.

Exploring

I took the kids out on a trail closeby our house the other day. I didn't want to walk very far, and they mostly wanted to explore, so that's what we did. Olivia's report of what we saw: 5 lizards, 3 horses, 3 big tadpoles, 2 crawdads (but one was dead), and tons of dragonflies.

Olivia and Jackson's favorite thing to see was the tadpoles.

Katelyn's favorite was the horse poop.

Parade and B-day

All fireworks in our area were cancelled this year - something about not wanting to start more forest fires when we already have a few burning nearby (like the biggest one in state's history). That takes a lot of the fun out of the 4th of July. But we still had the local parade.
Look at this float - familiar words?

To try to make up for the firework-free evening, we decided to go to the park and feed the ducks.

This is what we found at the ducks' usual hangout spot. A huge pile of hamburger buns and no ducks. A few others had had the same idea we did, so the ducks weren't too hungry for our old bread. That and the rain that started as soon as we got there ended our outing pretty quickly.

We celebrated John's birthday a few days later. We gave him a new weed whacker to play with.

The last few months it seems I've lost some blogging inspiration, but I'm hoping to get some back and start blogging more again!