The grandkids missed their grams and pinch!
Every year Blake's family hosts an Oktober fest at their house. The two years they were gone serving their mission in Indonesia and Blake and I were in charge of things they didn't happen. Neither did the famous easter egg hunts. But now they're back and the whole family got together to carry out the tradition once more.
Of course there was a hay ride...
Trying to keep up with the bigger cousins
Watching the cousins shoot their airplanes that light up
Going on a wagon ride with Grams and cousin K.
Brooke loves kitties. And this poor kitten was loved to death.
Brooke got soaked playing in the puddles
We ate lots of yummy food over the weekend
This is Brooke's "I'm suprised" face
Giving Pinch knuckles
And here is a video of Brooke being super silly one eveing. She kept putting a basket on her head and running around.
Remember Brooke's room before with the lovely soccer mural and gold 80's carpet?
It's definitely come a long way! I waited so long for this mural to come in the mail It came in over 80 pieces and took me an hour to apply, but it's done and I love it!
These pieces were supposed to go under the tree too. But when we get furniture in the room, I think they will be blocked, so I moved them over to a different wall. The cool thing is they are stickers so if it turns out the furniture won't block it, I can peel them off and move them. I'm already planning to move that lonely flower over to the other side with the other two.
At one place there were these paper leaves & Brooke insisted that we should tape them to her shirt instead of on the paper tree. At one point she probably had like 10 leaves on her shirt, but they all fell off.
We came home from SLC to find out that cousins Jack & Isabel had come to play! There was lots of jumping on the tramp, eating otter pops, playing on the swings, watching "How to Train your Dragon", and eating pizza and popcorn.
Saturday we took Brooke & Isabel to the corn maze. It's out in the middle of nowhere and is so fun. We opted not to even do the actual corn maze this year and just let Brooke and Isabel play in the courtyard area where they have tons of activities for kids to do. Isabel is so awesome with Brooke & Brooke adores her. I hope Brooke is as great as Isabel is when she's 8.
There were two different slides and Brooke just ran back and forth between the two.
They take you on a hayride to the pumpkin patch where Brooke was too busy finding pumpkins her size to carry to bother to look at me for a picture.
We had so much fun and definitely wore ourselves out. Plus it was a nice break from working on the house. We went to hang our new doors and realized the white of the doors wasn't the same as the white on the trim. We we ended up having to paint the trim of our entire house to match. But the good news is carpet is supposed to come Tuesday & Blake's parents get home on Wednesday!
While Blake was a away, Brooke and I had a little fun of our own having a GDO (Girls Day Out). We watched 'Beauty and the Beast" while eating popcorn, then later in the afternoon while it was rainy and cold out we decorated pumpkin sugar cookies. Brooke has become quite my little helper and whether it's helping me dust, unload the dishwasher or make dinner, she is right by my side doing her own thing. Frosting cookies was no exception She wanted to be right in the action. Her attention span lasted almost long enough to frost one cookie, then she spent the rest of the time trying to sneak frosting and sprinkles out of the bowl to nibble on. 
This is her puckered lip face after she just took a huge lick of frosting
And finally, I was trying to capture Brooke dragging her horse around by its tail and saying "come on horsey, come on" She was taking it for a walk around the house doing this. But instead, I did coax her to say a couple of her animal noises.
After:
*Loving having a good book to read with several more I'm planning on reading. I hate when I'm having a book dry spell with nothing good to read.
and her handprint wreath:
We weren't fans of the fact that it was carpet all the way to the front door. This really isn't an "after" picture, more of a "mid-way" picture:
It's hard to tell, since we still don't have carpet, but everywhere there's black is where the hardwood will be. Carpet will be installed in the living room. The hardwood still needs to stained too.
While Blake was busy laying the floor, I was in the kitchen sanding the exsisting floors so we can stain it all together and so they will match. Sanding is no easy task!
This is me showing Blake that my hand is now crippled from gripping the sander all day long. I sanded for like 4 hours and only got this one little spot in the kitchen done. Sanding is going to be like pulling out carpet staples: not hard, but tedious and the whole time you have to keep telling yourself "won't this look great when it's all done?" They don't call is sweat equity for nothing!