Hawk!

Can you identify this bird? It swooped onto the back fence at the Parentals' house. I'm pretty impressed the camera was able to take this picture from inside the kitchen.

We miss Arizona!!!!!!!!

Bet we won't be doing this in February of next year!

A safe place for a nap...

Ellen and Sabrina's Wild Ride!

Sari

Trying on Granna's Sari. Thank you, Granna!

Kite at Bear Lake

Up! Down!

Crash!

Biiiiiiiig Ice Cream!

Leslie's about to eat a huge ice cream!

Just kidding! It's fake!

Arizona Rainbow!

Make it pink

Leslie and Sabrina have requested that the blog background be pink as this is their favorite color.

Trick or Treating

Excellent Halloween Decoration

When we trick-or-treated a home in our ward, they pointed out the scorpion stuck in the spider web above their porch. We were very impressed.

Before church

While Russell was waiting for me to finish getting ready for church on the morning of the Primary Program, he took the kids outside and took their picture.

Posing with the Principal

Leslie's principal dressed as a scarecrow for the carnival. Russell could've gone as Smokey the Bear, as the PTA president was practically begging him and all the other men to, but he stoutly refused. Pity, it would've been a great photo op. (On the other hand, it did get up to 106 that day!)

Piloting the helicopter

For the school PTA carnival, the kids got to see and sit inside an actual helicopter, then watch it take off later.

Honor Roll Award

Leslie's school decided to start doing Honor Roll awards for the lower grades. Her teacher Mrs. DeGhetto awarded her for getting 100% on all her reading comprehension tests.
(The black marks on her upper lip are scabs and bruises from where that horrible, horrible dog bit her lip. And this was 5 days afterward! As Leslie put it, "I don't like dogs anymore, except for new, newborn puppies. And dogs that are asleep. But that's all.)
(She's wearing that particular shirt, rather than her usual school uniform, because it was school spirit week, and Thursday was "wear your favorite team jersey day." Leslie's favorite team is a German soccer team, because that was the jersey they had in her size at Other Mother's, and anyway, we probably know as much about German soccer as we do about the Phoenix Suns, which is what practically all the other kids were wearing.)

Sabrina and Miss Dawn

Sabrina loves preschool at Miss Dawn's house. She learns a new letter every week, and she can still write quite a few of them. She loved passing out gummy sharks to the other kids on Halloween.

Dr. Russ, PharmD. to be

As he left for his first day of rotation, I thought, here's how Russell will look every day from now on!

Right for carving

Pumpkin farm

Leslie, being an artist, chose all the pumpkins which had something special about them. The more deformed, the more she liked them.

Fierce Sabrina

Here's Sabrina's costume with accessories--she has a sword to slay the dragon (in her case, an eight inch stuffed pink dragon) and the horse banner of Rohan on her dress.
We had a lot of fun making these--we took a dollar store sword, stripped off the ugly skeleton designs, painted it gold and silver, and added a horse symbol made of spray painted fun foam.