pics from September + early October

Life is busy. The new job is great, but there's not a lot of time left, between an extra hour/day spent commuting and 4 classes to be prepped each week, and somehow the energy I used to spend blogging is taken up with things like prepping lecture and/or doing stuff w/the kids. This should improve in... another year or so, when I've prepped most of my classes at least once. It would help if Frida regularly fell asleep before 10, but that happens rarely these days. I'm not sure what will happen once she and Sam start sharing a room (in December); he is nearly always asleep by 9 these days, though at 2 he was a night owl as well.

There's a bunch of August that I missed: Grandma and Grandpa's visits (for cousin Ezra's first birthday and for Frida's second); J's cousin Matt's visit; and then at the end of the month our (kids + me) trip to MN to see Omi and Opa and Uncle Markus, Aunt Rei, and Emma, who were visiting there for a few days. The meeting of the cousins was very sweet, but I got very little of it on camera. Pictures exist (I have prints but not digital copies) and I'll post some at some point.

For now, some pics with captions, instead of a real post:

Sam's first day of first grade, first trying to look cool and then having been told to just look normal:





He has homework now. Three days/week he has to do various things with spelling words, like write a sentence using one or two of them. The first week of homework (beginning of October), one of the words was *sat*. Here's the sentence Sam came up with:


(My fish sat down and wrote a constitution of their own.)


Sam and his friend Alex made cookies:



Daddy does goofy stuff w/F's hair when he gives her a bath:



We picked apples:



Frida eats apples kind of like her Opa, i.e., "core? what core?" (she doesn't eat the seeds, though)





On weekend mornings, Sam wakes up earlier and amuses himself watching cartoons or playing in his room, but at the first sign that Frida is awake he bounds in and invites her to do something with him, and 3 minutes later they will be snuggled on the couch watching PBS Kids, or else in his bed reading (just before this was taken, he was reading her the text, and asking her to find various animals in the pictures. It was amazingly cute):



Last weekend was very warm, and we joined friends at the beach on Sunday. Crane's Beach has a depression in the middle that forms a long, shallow pool at low tide. It was perfect for the kids (ages 14 months through 6.5 years) to splash in:





Sam discovered new vantages on the classic Mr Potato Head:



(upside down-- whole new expression. "Doesn't he look like he's about to slap you?" Sam asks.)

And today the kids and I met Uncle Dan, Aunt Sara, and cousin Ezra at the same pumpkin patch we went to the past two years. I love pics of kids with pumpkins...