Benjamin Jackson

Get it? Ben "Jamin" Jackson???

;)

All By Herself

When Elsa was 'bout two, we used to frequent Chuck E. Cheese's.

She was too little to pull herself up the climby things until she and I, working together, figured out if she could get into a corner and use her bare feet to shove herself up, she could really go.

I used this to teach Adele to climb this gym the other day when we were at a Del Taco playground.

(Yes, Ryan is in THIS picture, but I traded places with him.)

See, after much coaxing I got her to stick her foot on the window to the side...
And use it to push!
I don't know if I was as proud of her as she was of herself.
It was much more difficult to get her out than it was to get her in!

Evening at a Farm

There is a large local farm here that has family Halloween activities all through October. My work did an activity for the employees and family there earlier in October. I THOUGHT I posted these, but I can't see them so....

Dirt mini-mountain slide, the most fun you can have on a burlap sack!
They had these cars just around to play on.


And a baby goat just...wandering.

Oh and best of all, a tractor pulling a bunch of barrels made into farm animals! Homemade train!

Fifteen Minutes After Leaving Home

We were clever enough to plan our departure to coincide with nap time. They stayed like this 3 1/2 of the 6 hour drive.

I am so good at parenting.

For REALZ!

Vegas, Baby!

This is Las Vegas in October!

(In my uncle's back yard)

These are all out of order because I can't work Blogger. But, a few weeks ago, we went to Vegas for baby G, Emma's baby blessing. (Fine, her name is Gemma!)

While there, we did exciting things:

(She's better at saying "frog" now)

We went to the Shark Reef at the Mandalay Bay casino. Way cool. Ben REALLY liked the jelly fish!





Elsa got some good shots of the scenery during the drive. She studied landscapes in school. This is a picture of a plateau she wants to show her teacher.

Halloween 2011

The weekend before Halloween, we gals attended our second annual Witch Day.

My girls with their "Aunt Nini" (or "Dooween" if you ask Adele).
Resting from nearly 20 min of walking!

And me, with my ravishing little darlings. Halloween Night

My two little angels. (Stop laughing, they are too!)
Trick-or-treat!!!


Dad's office party. The other kids went from desk to desk filling their buckets with candy but not Benjamin, he got hold of one and figured he'd best run as fast and far as possible before it got taken away!

Dino Day

About a month ago, Ryan and I noticed that we had a middle child.

We realized Deli doesn't get all the baby attention. We noticed we sometimes make a point of spending time with Elsa without "the babies" and that we naturally sometimes need to cart Ben around alone but this girl hasn't really had much time alone with the parents. And I figure there are only a few short years she would see time alone with the " 'rents" as a good thing.

So, as she is really into dinosaurs right now, and she roars at them whenever she sees a picture of one, we decided we better go see some "real" ones.

This is not a dinosaur, it is a shark. But, Adele will tell you, it is the scariest thing at the museum.

It's even scarier than possibly falling two stories I guess. (There were live fish swimming in the little stream below.)

If you have seen pictures of another little girl, who looks similar to this one, diggin' in this same dirt, feel free to get a little nostalgic and teary-eyed about the passing of time. I did.

She is such a fun girl. If you don't believe me, just ask her, she'll tell ya all about it.