Standing, Talking, & Walking!

Mason officially turned 14 months old this evening.  The last two weeks have been exciting ones for him.  He learned to stand independently, said his first word (doggie!) besides mamma and dadda, and took off walking!  He still uses a mix of scooting, crawling, and walking to get around, but walks more and more every day.  It is so funny to watch him toddle around so wobbly!

 

Mason also got his first haircut on Sunday.  He was always rubbing a lot of food in his hair trying to get it out of his eyes while he was eating.  It was time. 

Before:

 

After:  I think he looks a lot older now that it's cut.  I have mixed feelings about that!

In addition to all of those fun milestones, Mason has also been cutting his top molars the past couple of weeks.  He was waking up a lot at night and napping terribly.  Not fun.  At least he was happy during the day though.  I think we're past the worst for those two teeth now.  That gives him 10.  Just 10 more to go!

Halloween

Halloween is definitely my least favorite holiday.  This year was no different, but it is fun to see how excited Spencer gets.  



Alan was on carving duty this year.  Spencer was grossed out by the insides, but eventually helped.  :)

Not too shabby!

We celebrated Halloween a day early because that's when our ward was putting on a Trunk or Treat.  Mason began the day by smearing bananas all over his face and hair.  Nice.

The boys helped me get the big bowl of treats ready to hand out.

Spencer knew he wanted to be Lloyd from Ninjago for months before Halloween.  You can't buy Ninjago costumes so I knew I would be making it.  It wasn't that hard and would have been fine if I had started earlier.  Making costumes stresses me out!  Spencer was happy with it though.  He got to wear it four times: his school party, the Trunk or Treat, trick-or-treating to Grandpa Rasmussen on Halloween, and again on Sunday so Grandma could see it.  

Mason got to be the cutest, cheapest thing we found at Goodwill.  He was a pretty cute giraffe!

The Trunk or Treat got rained on a little, but was still fun.  I set up an I Spy game in my trunk for the kids to play before they got their candy.  It was raining so hard on Halloween afternoon/evening that we wimped out and only went to see Grandpa.  There's no shortage of candy around here though.  Spencer does a good job of not gobbling it all down.  A recent throwing-up at school incident taught him that his stomach doesn't handle a lot of junk food very well.  :)

Pumpkin Patches

We hadn't intended to go to two pumpkin patches this year, but the first one was so lame that we had to find a better one.  We tried Oregon Heritage Farm first.  It is an apple farm, but was advertising a pumpkin patch.  It turned out that their "patch" was about 20 pumpkins sitting on some brown grass.  I refused to pay for a pumpkin there, but we did pay $3 to do some activities for a baseball team fundraiser. 

Spencer thought the rope maze was way too easy.

 The tractor ride around the orchards was kind of fun.  I learned that an apple tree grows 100-150 lbs. of apples a year.

I didn't take a picture of the apple bouncy house, but Alan and Mason were happy watching Spencer bounce.

The chickens were the highlight for Mason.  It is hilarious how excited he gets over chickens!

We thought the next patch we found, Papa's Pumpkin Patch, might be lame too, but it was actually great!  They had a real field where you could pick your pumpkin off a vine.  Imagine that!

My attempt at a cute, brother picture.

I told Spencer he had to be able to carry the pumpkin he picked.  This one was pretty heavy!

Cute baby and pumpkins!

Soccer 2015

Spencer was really excited to play soccer again this fall.  He says it's his favorite sport.  We could make one teammate request and asked his friend S.C. to be on his team.  Neither of our families have moved, but we are no longer in the same ward or school so Spencer and S. don't get to see each other much anymore.  By random chance, it turned out that Spencer knew every boy on the team except for one.  Shane, Spencer's coach, grew up in Sherwood and was good friends with Alan's older sister.  He was by far the best coach Spencer has ever had.  A perfect mix of firmness and little-boy humor.  Practices were fun to watch.  

The boys somehow decided their team should be the Road Breakers, whatever that means!  There were several very skilled, little players on the team and they wound up winning every game.  Spencer is not a very aggressive player and prefers to play defense.  Since they don't play positions that this level, playing defense meant Spencer rarely got the ball.  He didn't seem to mind much, but Shane took it as a challenge to get Spencer to score a goal during a game.  During one game, he told all the other boys to pass to Spencer whenever they got the ball.  They actually listened to him and Spencer got his goal!

The weather was nice for most of the season, so I took Mason to practices.  He started out just sitting on the grass, but was crawling all over the place by the time the season ended.  He is a lot easier to take pictures of than a bunch of boys running like crazy!

Their last game was on Halloween morning and it was the only game with bad weather.  It didn't rain, but was cold and windy and I lost a contact right at the end.  Mason's face sums up how I felt at that game. Boo!

Shane and his nice wife, Dana, had the whole team over to their house for a party after the game.  The hosted a yummy lunch, had tons of fun activities for the kids, and passed out trophies.  It was a fun season and we are so glad Spencer had such a great coach and fun friends on his team!

I have to say that it is SO nice to have our Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings free again.  Not for long though.  Basketball starts this weekend!

Apples

A friend told me about the Portland Nursery's Apple Festival a few of weeks ago.  We had a free afternoon so we headed over to check it out.  My hands were too full to take a picture of the tasting line, but there were 60 varieties to taste!  We thought most of them were gross.  Braeburns are still my favorites.  Spencer likes Galas and I think Alan likes Fujis.  We're not trendy.  :)  Spencer didn't want to paint a pumpkin or color a picture, but he liked the scavenger hunt that led us all around the nursery. 

Ahhhhh!  Sorry for the out of focus!

Darwin and Debbie's Golden Delicious tree went crazy this year, much to my delight!  They gave us a ton of apples.  I had already order a bunch of others too, so we've been swimming in apples.  Mason grabbed this small one while playing in the garage and had a great time munching on it.

Alan was really sweet to help me with the apple sauce this year right in the middle of his super busy race season.  We canned about 50 quarts and have lots of apples left over for drying.  They are starting to get soft now so I think I'm going to start making fruit leather.  I'm not sick of them yet, but I think everyone else is!