"Mister Sun, Sun, Mister Golden Sun, Please Shine Down on Me!"

We miss the sun. We're in this weird weather pattern right now in the Midwest (a land cyclone, I believe) and we've had cold, wet, cloudy weather for about a week now. Yuck. In the words of one of our Kindermusik songs "These little children are asking you to please come out so we can play with you, oh Mister Sun, Sun, Mister golden Sun, please shine down on me!" Especially after the beautiful weather we had during August and the beginning of September, this has been hard.

Speaking of Kindermusik, we started up this semester's classes a few weeks ago. The girls still love their music classes, their Kindermusik CD's, the books, the instruments, the teacher, the songs, etc. The experiences have been well worth the investment.

We managed to do two different family hikes in the midst of the cloudiness. Last Thursday we met Matt (who had biked to work and thus was already in town) at the Aldo Leopold Nature Center for a nice hike. And then on Saturday we went to Lake Kegonsa State Park in the afternoon to get some fresh air. Both of those days Anna had taken a nap and we've learned that when she does nap we certainly need to get outside and burn off some energy in the afternoon/evening.

We also took the kids into McFarland on Friday night to watch Tina's band play at the McFarland Homecoming Game Kickoff. Then we stuck around for the first half of the football game with the Thompson family. We're working hard on teaching the girls that every football player is not a Packer; they kept asking when the Packer game was going to start :)

Anna gives us little snippets of her time at preschool, but I'd just love to be a fly on the wall for a day to see what goes on :) Last week on Tuesday, Anna was telling me that she needed to bring a bottle of ketchup to school the next day. My first reaction was "Really? But there's nothing about that in the calendar." So I asked Anna a few questions such as "Do they want an empty bottle or a full bottle?" and "What will you be doing with the ketchup bottle?" After talking with Anna a little bit, I soon realized that what she meant to communicate was that the next day would be a "Catch Up" day for kids to finish projects. Hehehe :)

Every day we hear what Anna had for snacks, what the project option was, whether or not they played inside or outside, if there were any important papers to bring home, how the special activity (show and share, music, or worship) went, and a few other tidbits. I guess that's a pretty good report from a 4 year old. She already has two running jokes that she tells me each day. The first is "No babies!" meaning that she didn't play with any of the babies, baby clothes, baby furniture, etc. She was very excited about those the first day, but seemed to lose interest pretty fast. The other joke is "I didn't hit my head today!" This is in reference to how she fell and bumped her head the first day they played inside instead of outside on the playground. Silly girl.

Kate is still crazy Kate. Her silly side is usually more prevalent than any kind of serious side. She knows very well how to push Anna's buttons if Anna's in a bad mood, and will often choose to do just that. Kate is also very into her pretend play these days, and can be absorbed in some kind of elaborate story with stuffed animals, little people, or legos, for long periods of time. But of all of our family, Kate definitely needs the most physical activity towards the end of the day ... good thing we still have the jumping mattress :)

Life is taking on a different pace, too, now that most of the garden preserving is done. Granted, there are still dozens of apples on the trees (even after making 35 quarts of applesauce thus far), lots of tomatoes on our plants which are amazingly still alive and thriving, and a few pears out there. Our pumpkins are crowding our front door since we can't put anything into our new basement storage room until the electrical inspection happens. We have a ridiculous amount of pumpkins and squash this year. I'll post a picture one of these days.

Some day soon, when the weather clears up and we can use our new basement space, we'll need to work on our annual fall work (hauling firewood, collecting leaves for mulch, putting everything away for winter), but until then we're in a bit of a holding pattern. We're trying to consciously enjoy it :)