Mrs. Eby and Ryan at their Halloween Party. Little Scholars does such a nice job with the holiday parties. The kids always have a blast. Ryan LOVES Mrs. Eby and she is so good with all the kids. I am so happy Ryan is having such a great experience at preschool.
Ryan with all his preschool buddies in costume. Too cute!!
Justin's 2nd grade class at their Halloween party. Jeff and I had a great time helping and taking pictures of the party.
The mummy wrap. Justin and Bracken won!
Justin loves to be creative and he starts talking about what his pumpkin will look like as soon as we start seeing pumpkins in early October or late September.
However, taking the pumpkin guts out is not one of his favorite parts of the tradition. He has never liked having his hands dirty or sticky. He must of got up at least 10 times to wash his hands during the process of removing the guts.
One of the things I love about Justin is he is always ready to lend a helping hand. Ryan was getting frustrated because he couldn't get all the strings out of his pumpkin. Justin stopped working on his pumpkin to help his little brother. What a great example he is for his younger brothers.
Ryan loves everything about Halloween, but he especially enjoys carving pumpkins.
He loves playing with the pumpkin guts and makes the best sound effects while doing it.
Joshua was so delighted with his pumpkin that he picked all by himself.
This was his first year to really enjoy our pumpkin carving tradition. He was only 5 months old last Halloween. I think baby's seconds are always better than their firsts. He was so cute!
He absolutely loved touching the pumpkin guts. Every time he suck his hand in his pumpkin he would giggle.
He also enjoyed taking the pumpkin guts out of his pumpkin and putting them inside of his brother's pumpkins. The older boys got a big kick out of that.
He drew his face on his pumpkin with a lot of help from mom. Then daddy carved it for him. After we put the candle in, he kept saying, "ohhhh" in a high pitched voice. He was darling the whole night.
The boys had so much fun making jack-o-lanterns for family night the Monday before Halloween. Each of them is sitting behind their pumpkin. As tradition, we all had a caramel apple as a treat after our night of carving.
Ryan had such a blast at Lagoon. For about 2 1/2 hours out of the 12 hour day at Lagoon, Jeff and I split up. He took Justin to all the big rides that Ryan is still too little to go on and I stayed with Ryan in Kiddie Land and watched him ride all of the rides over and over. He was all smiles! 
Justin and Ryan love the Dinosaur Drop. Ryan is always a little nervous at first, but once he rides it once, he wants to go over and over.
This is the new ride at lagoon. I can't remember the name, but Justin and Ryan loved it. It is a family water ride, but you can control how wet you get. We spent most of our time at family rides that we could all ride. Our favorites were the Tilt-o-Whir, the Scrambler and the Tidal Wave.
This is a weird picture to take and then love out of all the pictures we took this day. However, I love it because it shows such brotherly love between the boys. Justin was so darling in that he always kept a protective arm around Ryan in lines and made sure Ryan was all buckled and settled before buckling himself. If Ryan was nervous at all, Justin would say, "don't worry I won't let anything happen to you." Ryan would grin up at Justin and off they would go.
We had the best time and the best weather all day. We had t-shirts on all day until the sun went down when we put on sweat shirts. It was perfect, never too hot or never to cold. We ended up staying for 12 hours. We kept waiting for the kids to get cranky or for it to get too cold, but it never did. We had pajamas in the car for the boys and they were both out within 10 minutes. My mom and dad had Joshua for the day so he was happy. He cries anytime they leave our house without him. So we knew he was having a great day being spoiled. It was one of the those awesome days where everything went just right and I can't think of a thing I would change. Hooray Lagoon!!!
.JPG)
.JPG)
