Penn State Chics Dig Nerds

Saturdays snow made more of our leaves change color and fall down.  Although, the leaves definitely aren't as brightly colored this year. We cleaned the leaves off of the driveway and put them in the grass at the bottom of the slide. The remnants of our snowman.  It looks really dirty with leaves now.

This years first snow occurred already-- and it's only October!  Is this a sign of what is to come this winter??? The areas surrounding us received more snow that we did.  Some areas of our county had 12 inches of snowfall.  We probably only had 3 inches of very wet snow.  It snowed all day long (which was tantalizing to the kids), but it was too warm to stick around.  The kids were mesmerized just to look out the window at the falling snow. Natalee built a mini snowman. Brady helped Jesse and I build the large snowman.  Natalee helped to put the arms, nose and eyes on, too. Nice leafy hair, huh?  It's not often that leaves are still falling down while you have your first snow! You can see that our maple tree still has a lot of green leaves. Brady couldn't eat enough snow! This year, we got to play in snow before we got to play in the leaves!!!

 Today, were were fortunate to have Jesse at home with a day off.  After working so much overtime this past month and a half, he definitely deserved it! To take advantage of the nice weather (before tomorrows predicted snow fall) we went on a hike up the Thousand Steps .  We started along the highway by the Juniata River and hiked up the steps to the top of the mountain.  The kids and I took several breaks on the way up the mountain to take pictures.  We were waiting for Jesse to come back.  Unfortunately, when we reached approximately step 150, we realized that Meg was not going to be able to complete this hike any more.  This was a really sad realization that made me cry.  She was SO excited to come on this hike with us.  She could hardly contain her enthusiasm!  However, all of these uneven steps were really unsafe for her.  What started out as a great family hike was ruined a bit when Jesse had to take her back to the truck....

 When we had the playhouse delivered, we were given an extra slide to attach to the structure.  However, we couldn't figure out where to put it without drastically enlarging the playhouse deck.  Jesse came up with the idea to put it over by the tree so that the kids could slide from the driveway down to the yard.  It will make it handy for retrieving balls!  I think it could also be really nice for sliding into leaves!  We were out to enjoy what is projected to be one of our last warmer, sunny days. Meg looks thrilled.

Probably a girl?  We'll see around Valentines Day!

We picked out some pumpkins on Monday and then Friday afternoon we finally got to paint the pumpkins!  We had a busy week, so it was hard for Natalee to wait so long to paint. Oh, the concentration! For some reason Natalee decided she did not want to draw faces on the pumpkins after all.  She just wanted to paint freely. We placed our finished products out by the mailbox. Brady's big pumpkin work of art. Natalee's big and little pumpkin, plus the little one Natalee gave me to paint.  Natalee did have a lot of colors on hers until the very end when she decided to try and mix colors up.  That did not work very well for her!

Jesse has been working a massive amount of overtime lately.  So, we were glad to be able to spend a Saturday morning at Hartslog Day with him. We went in the kids tent area and created quite a few crafts.  Here, the kids put peanut butter on a pine cone and then coated it with bird seed.  Needless to say, Jesse was in charge of the peanut butter :) Brady had to test out the peanut butter :) When we got home, the kids hung up their pine cones on the tree for the squirrels to eat.  I think they enjoyed this craft most of all!

The rain finally stopped and we enjoyed a few minutes at the park this morning.  We checked out the soccer fields, too.  After days of rain, the soccer fields are a mess!