Random Stuff

Charlotte recently got in the mood to do some painting. Two Sundays ago, after church she just really wanted to paint anything. Alice had a small canvas picture of a fox that needed to be painted, so she let Charlotte do it for her. Then Alice wanted to do some watercolor painting. I guess art runs in this family.

She painted this all by herself.

Over the last month or so I have been reading books with the girls. They are classics that were condensed and illustrated for kids to enjoy reading them. We started with "The Call of the Wild". Then "Little Women", "Treasure Island", "Alice in Wonderland", "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Secret Garden". We didn't really care for "Alice in Wonderland" and I never cared for the movie much either. We're now reading "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and will finish with "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". I think the girl's favorite book so far was probably "The Secret Garden". They were so hooked on it that we read the whole book in two days! I also got to introduce them to the movies of "The Wizard of Oz" and "The Secret Garden" after we read the books. They liked both of them! Some of these books I had never read before until now, only watched the movies. So, this has been fun for me to be able to read them as well.

These were all only $1.00 at Walmart.

I was shopping at Costco a couple of weeks ago and trying to find some ideas for dinner. I had grabbed a regular package of cheese ravioli but then I saw a package that had orange pumpkins and black bats, so I got those instead because it would be fun to have it this month of Halloween! They tasted just as good as regular ravioli. And we used pesto sauce, which all of us like except for Alice.

This is what they looked like before cooking.

During cooking.

All done and, on the plate to eat.

One morning I went down to wake Alice and Charlotte up for school and Alice was laying in this position. It was too cute and funny with her crossed legs!

Last weekend we finally got around to closing and winterizing the pool. We had to clean it out the best we could with our nets first. Our pool cleaner robot is not working and it would have helped so much, but we did the best we could. It took a long time just to do the cleaning. The solar pool cover that we had bought last year only lasted us two seasons of use. It started ripping apart and leaving little chunks of blue everywhere. It was time for the garbage. We were told that it could last up to 5 years when we bought it, so we're not sure how true that is but it only lasted us two years. We think maybe it had a lot to do with sitting in the water with the bleach tablets too close and not getting circulated enough. Next year, we'll just try to put a tablet holder inside the skimmer when the pool is covered and hope that helps. It was an all-day project but we got it done. And we couldn't have asked for better weather to get that done. Sunny, no wind and just beautiful!

We stuffed the pool cover into these bags. Look at the mess it made!

Jack vacuuming up blue pieces and Garrett cleaning the pool.

Putting the winter cover on. It was a team effort.

All done! It feels good to have that done and that we could do it ourselves this year.