31 October 2021

Halloween trunk-or-treat at the church.  Mr. Brown is threatening Nut Brown, the elven archer.

Bobo and Rosebud and I were dressed as characters from Avatar the Last Airbender.  It was fun to work on the costumes together!  I ordered Rosebud's costume from amazon but it still hasn't arrived, so we ended up working out a last minute substitute using a white gi that we dyed blue.  Rosebud was pleased with it, and people recognized her.

Rose Pink spent hours on the makeup for her costume.  She's a doll with jointed limbs.

Since Halloween itself was on a Sunday, we dressed appropriately for church.  Rose Pink sat next to me at the organ helped me quick transpose some prelude hymns into minor keys for a spooky prelude.  It was fund to see who noticed besides the ward music chairman.

Sunday evening we went trick-or-treating with some friends in our neighborhood and met up for chili afterward.  That was fun too, although the trick-or-treating was not that great.  Bobo in particular had a great time with the other kids his age. Happy Halloween!!

 

27 October 2021

Some more Halloween fun from school.  The school librarian invited the kids to bring in a pumpkin made up to look like their favorite book character.  Bobo decided on Yotsuba and Rosebud chose Chi, a cute kitty from a book series called "Chi's Sweet Adventures" that she just loves.  The kids and I worked on them on Saturday and took them in on Monday.

26 October 2021

Last Friday was Fall Fest at the elementary school.  We all got costumed up and went.

Some of us did the pumpkin roll.  Rosebud came in last place and we were all cheering for her, "Go! Go! Go!" and she exclaimed, "Oh no!  I'm tiring!" and continued the Brown Family tradition of having a larger than expected vocabulary.

Rosebud and Bobo both won 2-liters in the ring toss - very pleased with themselves.  So Nut Brown and Rose Pink immediately decided that they needed to also, and they did.  There was a lot of soda drinking the next day.

It was really fun to see how kids kept running up to us and saying "Hi!" to Bobo and Rosebud.  Eventually I gave Bobo a bunch of tickets and he ran off with a group of kids to have some fun with them.  This was just what we were hoping for by sending them to school.

The teenagers wandered off with Mr. Brown to go play board games with a couple in our neighborhood, but Rosebud and Bobo and I closed the place down (I may have bought too many tickets).  It was fun!

One of the booths was a guessing game (how many M&Ms in the jar etc) and Mr. Brown and Rose Pink spent some time doing math and entering guesses.  Today Bobo came home from school and pulled a giant bottle of candy eyeballs out of his backpack and Mr. Brown said, "Oh, you won something!" and Bobo said, "No, YOU did!" because it turned out that Mr. Brown correctly guessed the number of gumballs in the jar.

25 October 2021

Over Columbus Day weekend, Bobo and Rosebud and I spent an afternoon at the skate park.  Unfortunately I didn't get any photos of Bobo, only video.  He was having a great time moving around on his skates.  Rosebud was busily happy too, practicing skating around and around and around this bench. 

After she was comfortable with that, she moved on to skating up and down a very small rise in the sidewalk.  She fell down several times but got up and kept going.  Bobo's protective equipment was chafing him so he took it off, but then he wanted to do some more adventurous tricks (skating on top of a bench, some jumps) I told him not without his hand guards/knee guards/helmet on.  Maybe we need to get him some nicer guards.

After awhile we went over to the playground:

And then we went back to the skate park for another hour.  I spent the whole afternoon sitting outside in the sun.  It was wonderful.

22 October (2)

Halloween activities are picking up around here.  Having kids in public school has given us a lot more Halloween in our lives.  Also, the city sponsored a "floating pumpkin patch" last Saturday, where they put the pumpkins in the city pool and invited the kids to jump in and get one.  It was on the chilly side so Rosebud wouldn't get in, but Bobo splashed in and swam around with his pumpkin for awhile.  It was such a novel and fun thing to do!

22 October 2021

Getting ready for school on the day of the Fall Festival.  The kids are allowed to wear their costumes to school and Rosebud is dressed as a ballerina.  I braided her hair and pinned a fake rose in the back.  Her actual costume is Katara from The Last Airbender but it appears to be stalled in shipping somewhere (thank you pandemic) so we were improvising.  She was pretty happy with it (it is, after all, PINK).  Bobo opted not to wear a costume to school.  Tonight is the Fall Festival at school and they are really excited to go and trunk-or-treat and play games.  Hopefully it will be as fun as they have been told it will be.

18 October 2021

Church youth dance in early October was outside, and it was a costume dance!  It was Nut Brown's first dance, and he has been looking forward to it for awhile.  Several earlier dances were cancelled due to COVID so he was really glad that this one came off, although he moped around for a few days ahead of time worrying that it would be cancelled too.

He decided to dress up as an elven archer.  I made his cape, very proud of myself.

Rose Pink played around with half and half makeup and decided to go with a half and half costume.  She altered the clothing herself and sewed it together.

Mr. Brown went with them as support for Nut Brown if he needed it.  He wore black with a cape and a black N95 mask for his allergies.

Nut Brown did not need any support- he was off and away and had a great time.  Rose Pink got to hang out with one of her church friends that she doesn't see very often, so that was a lot of fun for her too.

17 October 2021

Some creativity from Rose Pink using melty beads.  The fish on the bottom left was an experiment in melting on both sides.

13 October 2021

General Conference weekend!  We love it!  The kids make word lists and they get a mini M&M or a penny each time they hear one of the words.  We ran out of M&Ms at one point and this is Rosebud keeping tally marks of how many times she heard her words.  She would draw a line across the page and then mark down through it.

After awhile tally marks get old and by the fifth session she was occupied by drawing on Rose Pink's leg, which amused both of them.

Love General Conference weekend!  I love setting aside the whole weekend to listen to the apostles and prophet and other speakers.  I love how much my kids listen in order to get M&Ms, and I love that Rose Pink has insisted that we have a tradition of making ramen for conference lunch on Sunday until it actually became a tradition.

11 October 2021

My parents came to visit at the end of September for a weekend.  We went hiking in Balcones:

and went to see the school play that Rose Pink had a hand in putting together (Little Women):

(the Davids sitting together)

and then Grandma and Grandpa took us to  play place with go-karts and mini-golf and pizza and even a tiny roller coaster.

(that's Rosebud cautiously driving one of the slowest go-karts ever built)

also there were bumper boats and we had a bunch of fun soaking each other.  Yay!

Sunday we went to church and then hangout all afternoon.  Grandma had brought a bunch of neat things to share, including some rocks, ancient Syrian bracelets from Aunt Gert, a collection of raptor feathers and first edition stamps, and these nifty bubble blowers made out of water bottles that blew bubble snakes:

Nut Brown was sick all weekend (strep) but the rest of us had a good visit!  Rose Pink planned the menu with some help from Mr. Brown, and then carried it off very nicely.  We stayed in a guest house together that belongs to a friend of mine and it was very nice.

 

6 October 2021

The other day Rosebud was very upset with me at breakfast for putting her hair up in two ponytails but she was adorable in her upset-ness.

This week she brought home the below award from her teacher:

Bobo also came home this week and told us that his teacher had assigned him to attend the math classes for fifth grade (he's in fourth grade).  So we have a couple of good mathematicians in our family!