I'm no good at playing catch up so. . . we had a good Thanksgiving, it seems like the days are passing soooooo slowly and I'm getting nothing done, but here we are just ten days away from Christmas and 4 weeks from baby time.  So I guess time flies. . . but then again not really.

Anyway, so we put up our Christmas tree at the beginning of the month.  It's very beautiful, and Jace always likes all the lights in the house turned off to he can see the pretty lights.  Cameron does not like that, so usually they fight about the lights a lot during the day.  Just one of their many things to fight about.

Tonight was our church Christmas party.  The primary kids put on a little nativity scene.  Cam was supposed to be a sheep, but he refused even though I made him a cute paper plate to wear.  He did "baaa" from the safety of the audience though.

Jace was thrown into the role of Joseph.  He did not really want to wear a costume.  He did not really want to be Joseph.

He was a good sport though, even after patting the baby so softy, causing it to fall out of the little manger it was in and onto the floor.

But then the program kept going. . .

and going. . .

. . . and going

Until he was almost completely laying on the floor with a look of total exhaustion and depression.  I have begun to realize that neither of my kids function really well after seven o'clock, since they are usually in bed between six thirty and seven.  This is great when we're just staying at home, but when we have any kind of evening event to attend, it gets a bit difficult.

And although his finger was skirting ridiculously close to his nostril, I wanna believe that it never actually went it. . . 

And then after the program he was just completely done with it all.

I guess he thought drowning out the noise would help.

But then both the audience-lurking sheep and the annoyed-with-everything Joseph perked up when it was time for Santa to arrive.

They both were very excited when he arrived.  Cameron was pretty cute about it.  

Aww, he's waving.  What a sweetie.

He was also not at all afraid of Mr. Claus.  And he had his eye on Santa's bag of candy the whole time.  In fact, when asked what he wanted for Christmas, all he would say was, "I want candy."  So I guess Santa has it easy this year with Cam.

And Jace practiced over and over what he wanted to ask Santa for.  A hot wheels mega loop mayhem set.  

We took some really cute Power Rangers trick-or-treating yesterday.

The blue one, with his mighty muscle suit that my mom found second hand and mailed to us (so I had to custom make the mask out of old milk jugs--stinky but super cool).

And the red power ranger, who was actually supposed to be a cute little Winnie the Pooh. My mom mailed me that costume, too.  However, when Cameron saw Jace in his power ranger suit he would have nothing to do with Pooh.  So he became a ranger as well.

Here comes the mighty blue ranger, so excited to show me that he got "SKITTLES!"

And here is the mighty red ranger, very cautious and somewhat scared of a jack-o-lantern that was making scary noises on this porch.

Happy Fall!

Today we went to the park to get the pictures in the leaves.  Yesterday we were out running errands and so I brought my camera thinking that we might go to the park and take pictures.  Then when we got there I discovered I left the card out of my camera.  So I was disappointed.  Then today on a whim we tried again.  And we had success!

I took probably over 300 pictures.  So these first few are some fun, not quite frame-able shots we got.

At first the boys were not really into it.  Jace kept saying, "Let's just get this over with."  But then I bribed them.  With candy.  Because that's how I roll.  I told them they could have two Skittles for every shot I liked.  And then when we got home and I paid out, I conveniently "liked" enough shots for them each to have a fun size bag of Skittles.

Oh Jace.  He always makes the goofiest faces.

In the above picture Cameron is running to an enormous pile of leaves.  Jace has already dived into it.  But when I got there and saw how deep the pile actually was, I kind of freaked out.  I made them get out, much to their dismay.  But just the thought of what kind of creepy crawly creatures might have been lurking inside made me shudder.  It was a really really deep pile.

They had fun running down this hill, and then hiking back up and doing it again.  In the picture below if you look carefully you can see Cameron's chubby cheeks in mid-sag from his run.  

Here, let me help you see a little better.

Okay so now here are the shots that I "liked" and paid in Skittles for.

 I'd say these boys earned some Skittles, wouldn't you?