October

The rain is here.  Puddle stomping is now a daily activity.

Sierra's pumpkin patch field trip.  She was so proud to have Jaxon there.

Sierra received a compassion award this month during a school assembly.

Hoping he can pour out the seeds rather than use his hands to scrape them out.

Silly girl loves this part of the process

So much concentration.  She did almost the whole thing by herself this year.

 

Parade at school.  Sierra wanted Jaxon to join her.

Waiting to serve candy at GG's house

Love these moments soooooo much!

 The rain is here.  The good news: our new roof is working beautifully.  The bad news: the rain is here.  Despite my attitude towards the rain, the kids have been enjoying the puddles.  Jaxon begs to go jumping first thing in the morning, but I usually make him wait until after lunch.  We come back to the house and I pour water out of his boots.  My kids are true Oregonians.  I'm not sure who they got that from.  It definitely wasn't me.

Another busy month is in the books.  We managed to stay healthy which is hard to come by this time of year.  Sierra continues to love school and I have started volunteering for about 3 hours once a week again.  Jaxon loves it because he gets a "drop off day".  He gets to go stay at my parents house while I work at the school and hang out with my dad.  My mom has bible study or swimming on Tuesdays, but my dad makes sure to be there to hang out with his little buddy.  When I come to pick him up they are busy building Legos or Jaxon is jumping on the trampoline in time with dad's piano music.  It's pretty great.

This year I've been doing lots of prep work for Sierra's teacher such as stapling packets, getting different art projects ready, as well as copying papers.  But I also spend about 40 minutes helping with math.  There is such a huge difference in abilities in class and it's so hard to get all of the kids the help they need.  Some need extra help to meet core requirements, while others needs challenged.  So when I'm there the class is usually split into two groups and I help one group while the teacher takes the other.  Hats off to teachers.  It's so hard to make sure that all of the students get challenged.

We had a quick field trip to the pumpkin patch in late October.  The pumpkin patch is only a few miles from the school so Jaxon and I met up with Sierra's class at the patch.  It's always so sweet to see how excited she is to see us there and how proud she is to have Jaxon by her side.  She is such a wonderful big sister.  We also went to the school on Halloween to watch the whole Elementary school parade through the gym with their costumes on.  At one point Sierra decided to take Jaxon with her as they walked though a classroom.  I thought he would love it but apparently one of the kids they walked by had a scary costume and Jaxon lost it.  He realized he couldn't find me and panicked.  I felt so bad.  I have to admit I was kind of surprised at the creepiness of some of the Elementary level kids costumes.  Yikes.

This year without a nap to contend with, we got an early start to our Trick-or-Treating.  We walked around downtown Corvallis to get some candy and then visited my Grandma's neighborhood.  The kids both love getting candy but they are actually more excited about getting visitors and handing out candy at my Grandmas house.  We never get Trick-or-Treaters where we live, so they love to go to GG's house on Halloween.  Jaxon would get so excited when the doorbell would ring.  We sure love that my Grandma lives close and that we get to see her all the time.  It is such a special privilege.