Welcoming Fall with Apple Picking

Fall is my favorite season. Cooler weather, boots, jackets, soup, pumpkins, K-State football, colorful leaves - just the thought makes me so happy. I had heard about an apple orchard outside of Newton, and visiting it seemed like the perfect start to fall.

We didn't really know what to expect when we drove out to the orchard, but we had so much fun! We had the whole orchard to ourselves. We got to eat as many apples off of the trees as we wanted, and Natalie ate the most out of all of us. 

She didn't let go of this huge apple the entire time we were there. She actually didn't let go of it until we got home, and by that time most of it was gone! She kept smiling and saying "mmmm."

We made it home with about seven pounds of four different kinds of apples. I can already taste the apple desserts in our future!

11 Months

Natalie turned eleven months old a few days ago. She's starting to really communicate with us through noises, faces, and gestures, which makes everything so much more fun.

At eleven months old Natalie:

• weighs about 22.5 pounds.
• still has eight teeth. No new teeth this month.
• has started to pull the bows out of her hair.
• talks non-stop at home, but is almost silent when other people come around.
• is starting to climb.
• gives lots of kisses especially in the mornings. 
• claps and blows kisses. She doesn't actually "blow" her kisses yet. She just kisses her hand and leaves it up at her mouth, but it's still cute. 
• loves to dance. She bounces up and down when she hears music. Usually she just dances to her musical toys, but last weekend she even danced at church.
• still loves to read stories. Her current favorite is The Nose Book.
• has already learned that everything is better with ketchup.
• will sometimes hold my hand when we walk somewhere, which is the cutest thing ever. 

Grandma O's Birthday

Natalie is obviously very worried about what Emmet is doing.

PSR with Mrs. O'Halloran and Mrs. O'Halloran

Lacy and I taught our first night of PSR (I'm still getting used to calling it that as we always called it "catechism" when I was growing up) last night. We're teaching seventh grade, which was incredibly intimidating to us at first, but I really think we're going to love it. We seem to have a great group of kids. I thought seventh graders would be more grown up than they are, but our kids seem to be the perfect combination of little kids and big kids. They are little enough to still participate and get excited, but they're big enough to understand and discuss more complex topics. We have a really exciting, upbeat, and current curriculum which will make our job so much easier. I think the kids are going to really like it.

Too optimistic too soon? I sure hope not!

Yes, they're calling both of us Mrs. O'Halloran for now. In all actuality they probably won't call us anything, so it will probably work out just fine.

Week of Birthdays

We kicked off O'Halloran birthday week (four birthdays in one week) last night with a party for Grandpa O. Unfortunately, this cell phone picture is the best one we have to commemorate the night.

Taking the Plunge

My former self would have thought I was crazy, but my current penny-pinching self thought it was worth a try, so I did it. I ordered cloth diapers.

Maybe it's because I've only been using them for a few days or maybe it's because we still have quite the disposable diaper stash (which Chris still exclusively uses) to fall back on, but so far it hasn't been so bad. 

I thought the extra laundry would be overwhelming, but I realized that when there isn't any folding involved, it hardly counts as "laundry". So far I haven't been too overwhelmed by the extra button pushes that it takes to turn on the machine :) Really, that's all I do. 

I thought they might take too much time to put on because it was already hard enough to put a disposable diaper on our squirmy girl, but I bought a fairly simple diaper, and now that I'm getting the hang of it, it doesn't take much longer than disposables did. 

I thought I would be really grossed out by "cleaning" the dirty ones, and I was absolutely right. It's definitely not the most fun thing, and it's almost impossible with a little girl in tow, but I'm starting to get a method that seems to be working. We'll see. If I fail at cloth diapering, this will be the reason. 

Overall, though, not too bad. Crazy, I know. 

Runway Baby

A couple guys are finishing the dry wall in our basement this week, so we have a pretty drop cloth runway leading from our front door to the stairs. Natalie loves it.