National Adoption Day Picnic

We went to a family picnic today with other families from the adoption agency that helped us bring Jack home, Building Arizona Families. Lovely day, beautiful park in Downtown Phoenix with a kiddie amusement park in the middle. We planned on going to the amusement park after the picnic. We've had some tickets we bought off of groupon early in the summer and it just never seemed cool enough or close enough to use the tickets. With the family picnic at the same park, in the fall- perfect! The family picnic was really nice with bounce houses, lots of goodies and crafts for the kids and surrounded by water so we could feed our leftover buns to the swans and ducks.
  After the picnic we strolled over to the amusement park with some very excited kids only to be told this is the one day of the year our groupon tickets wouldnt' be accepted. Of course. Harvest Festival, today only. This kind of thing always happens to us! This is why we never tell the kids where we are going until we get there, just in case. Ack! Our poor kids, we told them we'd come back next weekend with our tickets and we strolled around and picket out which rides we wanted to try next week. then we went back out to the park area and played on the playground a bit. Looking to assuage our consciences, Brent rented a paddle boat and we took turn taking the kids out on the lake. They really enjoyed that and we all felt much better. Finished the day off with Pizza on the way home and thus ended a near perfect day.

 

Hiking

Columbus Day Weekend Hike.

Halloween

The Ringmaster

Lucy carving her Buzz Lightyear Pumpkin

Brent finishing the Buzz Lightyear Pumpkin while Lucy and Jack make pumpkin soup

Neighborhood Pumpkin Carving party

Finished pumpkins. Ah there's one missing! Karianne made a jail with a little gourd trapped inside.

I tried to get a picture of the moon on the left there coming up behind Angie, but it didn't quite work. Use your imagination.

Jack went through a few costume ideas...

He finally decided on a pirate.

Lucy getting into character as Buzz Lightyear

The only picture I got of all of them. It gets dark pretty early right now and we had to get them to stand on the porch to get enough light right before they headed out.