Catching Up!!

I am so sporadic with my blog posting!!  It is crazy!  It seems that sometimes I have all kinds of time to post and other times just no time at all.  I love keeping this blog as I feel it is a photo journal that my kids will always have.  At least I hope they are always able to access it.  I need to figure out how to turn it into a photo album they can hold.  Would be a lot to print out.  :) 


This particular post is going to host a bunch of different things we did over the summer and into the fall. 




Emily's softball season ended.  She very much misses the game and would like to be playing now, but just was not into doing the travel team at this point.  May change her mind in a few years, but I am hoping she will want to try out for the JV softball team in two years when she is eligible.  Softball season ended and her amazing coach, Crystal, arranged for the girls to have a fun afternoon!  They had a picnic and then went to Massanutten (a local resort) for some flipping fun!


 

She does love her softball!!  These were the Shooting Stars.

Hoping the Shooting Stars (Emily's softball team) can have a team again this spring!! 






In July my Dad's Cousin, Martha, hosted a mini reunion.  The Leftwich family was supposed to have their every-two-years reunion at Pennmeryl Farm, but things fell through and it didn't happen.  So Martha and her husband John were gracious enough to host a mini one.  I took this really great group picture and it ended up being really blurry.  I didn't realize I had the manual focus on.  Uggh!  I will make sure that it is on auto focus, or I will at least focus it, before that would happen again.  :) 


We had three generations at this reunion.  My dad's generation is now the oldest.  All of the members of his Dad's family have passed away.  My dad has two sisters, Judy and Kathy.  I have mentioned them in previous posts.  My dad's sister Judy passed away, expectantly, several years ago.  Two of her three children were at this mini reunion.  My dad's cousin's children were there and some of her grandchildren were there.  It was so fantastic!  Below is a picture of my three kids, my brother's two kids, my cousin Shawn's two kids and my cousin Michelle's two kids.  They played together as if they had been able to do that all their lives.  It was so sad when we left.  They didn't want to leave each other!!




Love this picture!  I love that they all had such a great time playing together!  How often do you get to play with your second cousins?

2nd cousins playing cornhole

  

You have seen my postings on Geocaching I know.  So often we don't think about Geocaching.  We love it so much and it is something we do so seldom.  Throughout the summer and fall, this past year, I think we may have gone Geocaching maybe 2 times.  Sad!!  This was one day that we went and we took the dog.  And then there is a picture of one other day we went to one close by our house.  I wish we would think about doing this more often.  We really do love it!

Geocaching in Charlottesville

Sometimes it takes us a while to find one and we will get frustrated.  :)  This was one of those times.

Stopped for ice cream and a little arm wrestling after geocaching

And hanging out with the cows  :)

This was a pretty place to get a cool Cache!  Not sure if Lydia is not wanting to take the picture or if it was too hot or what.  This one was pretty close to our house.  JMU Farm.  I do remember it being pretty hot that day and lots of bugs.

On our way back from Geocaching in Charlottesville, we stopped on Lydia Mountain to take a picture of Lydia in front of the signs.  I did this a long time ago and it was taken with an old phone I had.  The picture quality was not that great.  This quality is not the greatest either, but better than it was.  We go over Lydia Mountain every time we go to Charlottesville through Ruckersville.  We always seem to be on a time table when we are heading over and say "We will stop there on the way back" and then either forget or it is dark when we come back.  We finally remembered to stop on Lydia's Mountain to take a picture!!

One day maybe Lydia will live in one of these.  :)

In September, we visited the Pumpkin Patch.  A couple years ago, my brother, Paul, told us about a pumpkin patch he visited while visiting my parents.  It is in Weyers Cave.  They let you fill up a wagon with as many pumpkins and gourds as you can put in there without holding on to the pile (to keep it from falling)--for $25.  This year they changed their price to $30, but it is still a great deal!  We went there last year too.  September was a bit early and it was very warm that day, but September (after the kids birthdays) is the start of fall.  Just wanted to be able to display them as long as we could.  We had a really great time and got a TON of pumpkins!  The bad thing about getting them in September is that by Thanksgiving, some of them have started to rot and had to be thrown away.  On the up-side, you  have so many that it really doesn't matter. 

Lydia Pumpkin posing

Emily did a little gourd dancing.

Not really sure what was happening here.  :)

This is the wagon we get to fill.  I thought I took a picture of it when it was full, but I guess I didn't.

Getting ready to hunt some pumpkins.

Pickin some

The gourd dancing was a little bit out of hand.

More Pumpkin posing.



This is what our door looked like once we washed them all off.  The three little ones in the front became Loki's favorite ones.  He would carry them around everywhere.  He also eventually poked holes in the green gourd by carrying it around with his teeth.  It didn't last too long.

 At the end of the school year last year, Lydia and Emily had a friend move to Hawaii.  Abby (the friend) has a father who is in the military.  She has moved around a lot.  I think I could stand living in Hawaii.  :)  Abby sent the girls a care package back in the fall.  It was so exciting!!  They received a bracelet, hair bow, mini backpack and a shirt!!  They loved receiving it!  They have talked to Abby a couple of times since she moved.  I wish there was something fun we could send to her!!



We need to have something fun we can send from Virginia.  Who knows what that would be.  :)  She lived here for a few years so nothing she has never seen before.

Punk'n Pitch'n

I have always been one to love pumpkins and Halloween!!  While it means summer has come to an end and the dreaded cold weather is on the way, it is still such a fun time!!  Each year I get the kids pumpkins, but I typically will get one for each kid and that is it.  Pumpkins are really expensive considering that they just sit on your porch or are made into jack-o-lanterns.

This past Saturday, all three kids had somewhere to be.  Emily had a softball tournament, Ryan had band practice to gear up for his band competition this coming weekend, and Lydia had a birthday party to attend at the water park.  Mike decided, since he had not been able to come to a tournament of Emily's in a while, that he would take her and stay with her.  This was, like always, a 12 hour thing.  In between band practice and birthday party, Ryan, Lydia and I went to get pumpkins.  My brother had been to the Middle River Farms where they let him fill up a wagon (all you could put on it) for $25. 

They have now increased the price to $30, but we crammed our wagon full.  You can see a picture of Ryan and Lydia pulling it.  We hated that Emily and Mike could not come with us, but the next few weekends are booked and we wanted to try this out before they were too picked over.

Once we got the pumpkins home, and Emily got home, the kids all put the pumpkins together and divided them up.  They then decided on where to put them and made their own arrangement of them.  This past Sunday I took a picture of the girls (Ryan and Mike were on their way to see the Redskins) dressed for church--with the pumpkins.  Ryan and Lydia picked some big ones so we could only get a certain amount.  We did get a few small ones, but the kids put them in their rooms.  Love pumpkin season!

Pumpkin Patch Fieldtrip

Lydia and Emily's class went to the Pumpkin Patch on Monday. A ton of parents were able to go (not me :(, but Mike was able to) and get great pictures of their kids. Each child picked their own pumpkin to take home. Emily took a long time to pick hers out, so Mike hurridly assigned a pumpkin to Lydia. They took a hay ride and made their own scarecrow.

This is a picture of their class, but I am not sure where Lydia is :)

Pumpkin Patch Day!!

Grrr! This post did not do what I wanted it to! I downloaded a lot of pictures and then in my moving them around, many of them were somehow deleted. Once I realized it I downloaded the lost ones again, but because of the way I arranged the pictures to start with, I am not able to move the newly added ones back in, in order. So . . . . here are a bunch of disorganized pictures from the pumpkin patch. Scroll all the way down to the end of the post and these pictures at the top will make sense. :)

I always joke about how all of my friends have girls and poor Ryan has no little boys to play with. This is SOOOO true--right down to his cousins . . . he has male step cousins, but biological cousins are all girls. Come on friends . . . lets have some boys :)

On Saturday, my friend Kara and her girls Lynnea and Olivia went with us to the Hess Pumpkin Patch. Soooo fun! It cost a little more to get into than I had really wanted to pay, but there was a lot of stuff for the kids to do! Soccar ball bowling

How cute are these guys? They always have so much fun together! I promise, Kara and I did not coordinate our girls clothes! :) Again, Ryan and the estrogen :)Rubber Duckie Races while pumping water. The water would run out from time to time and the ducks would not slide. The child this would happen to would not be happy.They had a cow train. This was too funny! Kara and I rode too!! Very bumpy ride. They all loved it, but towards the end of the ride Lydia wanted to get off. She is like me and does not like it when she does not feel in control of something. The last half of the ride she was yelling "stop!" and Ryan, Emily and Lynnea were yelling "faster!" :)Musical pots and pansMilking cowsThe bunny house. Olivia fell in love with the bunnies! All the kids were trying to pet them through the chicken wire and then would pull away when the bunnies would try to nibble their fingers--laughing the entire time!! One more at the bottom of the pictures. Olivia and Lynnea "Back home on the Farm"The Corn Deer tractorThey had a slide that went underground. The kids would ride down on their burlap sacks and then walk back up the hill and go again--over and over! In the corn maze at the end of the day. LtoR-Lydia, Emily, Lynnea, Ryan--Olivia in front. We decided not to go through the corn maze because we had already been there 3 1/2 hours and they told us the maze would take at least 45 minutes to get through and that is just with adults. No thanks! Maybe next time :)

Finally, they had pig racing. They had pigs race to the finish line to eat Oreos. It was too funny! Absolutely the greatest day! Awesome weather! Awesome company!