October Catch-Up

I'm hoping this will conclude the rest of the month-long catch-up posts and that I can get back to posting more regularly, but we'll see! :)

The first weekend in October we watched my nephew Aiden because my sister Debbie had to go out of town. He's very easy-going and gets along well with the kids. As part of Abby's homeschooling that week, we were studying trees and all the different animals and plants that depend on trees to live. So, we took a walk around our park looking for as many of these things as we could spot. Jake was the keeper of our notebook and Abby was careful to notice even the smallest details with her magnifying glass. :)

Lots of looking upward on this walk!

I have been hoping to get Jake potty trained, but it doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon. I learned with Ben not to push it too much, so I'm trying to be content to wait. :) It's not a willful issue with Jake (as it was with Ben), but rather that he just can't seem to figure it out yet. He will "try" and sit on the potty chair for awhile, but only twice in the last several months has anything come out. In the picture below, Abby was being so kind and such a help by sitting next to him and reading him books and encouraging him. She is such a sweet sister!

 We caught the tail-end of a local Pioneer Fair following our Sunday afternoon naps. Ben was quite excited to learn about branding and take home his own piece of branded wood.

The fair took place at the Tumwater Falls Park, and though my mom and nephew Solomon had to leave, we stayed for awhile after the fair ended to play. The playground is one of the only parks in the area that still has the original toys from when I was a kid - just two simple, concrete boats. One might think that kids would be bored with such a simple playground, but my kids (and all the others) LOVED it! It was fun to see them use their imaginations. Jake and Ben gathered up sticks off the ground and loaded them into one of the boats, pretending they were tuna. Abby carefully stacked wood and painstakingly removed individual pine needles to put in her pile (I never even asked her what she was making!). I enjoyed the warm sunshine as I watched them play for an hour or more and thought about times when my mother brought me and my siblings to the same place. I'm so glad they've left the park as it was when I was a kid

Even I could imagine Abby was at sea at this moment with her hair blowing in the breeze and her looking off into the horizon! :)

And, as usual, I couldn't pass up a little photo op. :)

For a month or so we'd tried to have a garage sale, putting it off week after week for various reasons, most often weather-related. So when the forecast predicted 0% chance of rain for a weekend, my mom and sister Rebecca and I decided to go for it....unfortunately, while it technically didn't rain a drop, the fog was so thick all morning that everything got drenched. Humidity was at 98%. Oh yeah. :oP

A few days after that, I called my in-laws to see how many days we had left to get out there for the cranberry harvest and I was told that that day was the LAST one! Yikes! So, spur of the moment, the kids and I dropped everything and raced out to Grayland. I dressed the kids in long sleeves and we brought big winter coats...and it ended up being HOT and SUNNY! Seriously, October weather around here is hard to figure out. We ended up having the BEST day and were soooo glad we went!

No, this is not the normal way of picking cranberries but they decided to do it anyway. I'm sure the 38 berries they picked made a HUGE difference in the harvest. ;o)

The kids really aren't much help on the bog, so when there was a lull in the work for me to do, I suggested to my mother-in-law that we head down to the beach for a bit since it was so warm. It was GLORIOUS! What an amazingly, warm day with almost no wind!

Jake was a little scared of the incoming waves, but he hammed it up a ton every time one got even semi-close, hollering, "Aaaaaa! The wave is coming!" :) Such a silly guy!

We headed back to the house for some dinner (poor Grandpa and the hired hands were still working out on the bog!), and then back to the beach because it was a clam tide and Grandma had talked us into staying! It was absolutely lovely with the sun setting...unfortunately, because of various factors, the clam digging itself was bad. Hundreds of people were clamming up and down the beach but no one was catching - tourists or locals.

Grandma and Abby caught just one (you can see the digger sticking out in Abby's hand in the picture below).

And then, it got worse. A big wave came up unexpectedly, Abby and I raced ahead with me carrying Jake, and Grandma was bringing up the rear behind Ben. I heard her holler and I looked back to see Benny face-down in the water, swirling around in circles in two-foot deep water. It was a scary few minutes. My first instinct was to run to him, but Jake was in my arms and by this time the wave was at least a foot deep around us., so I couldn't. I sloshed through the wave, trying desperately to get to the end of the wave so I could set Jake on dry sand and get back to Ben. The wave seemed to keep going forever, farther and farther up the beach. I glanced back and Ben was still in the water, but Grandma was getting closer to him. I nearly started to panic - I called out for someone to help, but people were some distance away and just kind of looked at me strange (probably had no idea what I needed help with!). Finally, I go to the sand where Abby was waiting and set Jake down and told her to grab onto him and not let go. I raced back into the water, and could see that Grandma had gotten Benny stood upright by that time. But I continued to run as fast as I could, and grabbed my Benjamin so close to me when I finally reached him. It was such a scary few moments, and seemed to last forever. I hated not being able to go to him immediately . It was hard. He was definitely shook up and upset (he said, "I don't want to go clam digging again. It's too dangerous!"), but he was a real trooper, making the hike all the way up the beach approach to the car all on his own even though he was soaked from head to two and all the way through to his underwear and had sand in every imaginable crevice of his body! After a warm bath for Ben at Grandma's, he bounced back and we headed back to Olympia with the kids falling asleep within the first five minutes. And even with that awful experience with Ben at the end, the day was still a huge success in our memories.  :)

The following week was Abby's 6-year-old birthday (party pictures will follow in a separate post). Kevin was gone fishing on her actual birthday (as he was for a good part of October!), so we promised her to go out to eat a different day to celebrate. In the mean time, I decided to take the kids on an outing in honor of Abby's birthday. We headed to Lattin's Cider Mill and had a lovely time together. And since it was a birthday outing, the kids were pleased that I splurged on things I normally wouldn't have (or at least not all in one visit!): a merry-go-round ride, fresh cider donuts, and honey sticks. Yum!

We had a yard work day, raking up leaves, digging up dying plants from the vegetable garden, and harvesting the sunflower seeds.

On the very last day of October, we got a call from a local grocery store that Ben had won the coloring contest in his age group! He was sooo pleased! He had spent several hours on this one, being very careful about staying in the lines. It's been neat to see his coloring really start to take off the past couple months. Ben was very confident that he would win, so we were just tickled to get the call. He won a five dollar gift certificate at the store and picked out the items below.