Autumn in South Florida - quite a difference

It's FINALLY October.  I had been dreaming of the cooler weather that signifies FALL.  Sadly, that was not to be this year.  Yep, still really really hot here in South Florida.  Fingers crossed that it cools off at some point before it is supposed to get hot again.  

So October started out with a loose tooth!  Lucy's 3rd! She is so far behind on the losing-of-teeth program ... it is really quite sad.  She is only to be outdone by Ben who has lost a total of ZERO choppers.  Oh well, they do eventually have to fall out.  It will happen.  Back to Lucy.  Here is the tooth - DANGLING by a teeny tiny baby tooth root.  Will she let me twist it - NO!  I love to pull teeth.  Maybe I should have been a dentist.  It came out at school.  Bummer. 

Lilly got glasses!!  She had been saying she couldn't see clearly and lord knows my vision started going bad about 5th grade so off we go to the eye doctors.  She was not a fan of the dilation.  I told her that she rocked the Yoko Ono glasses.  Come to find out, my sweet baby has a lazy eye!  Who knew - not me that is for sure.  Her right eye is just a tad out of alignment and so they recommended she wear a patch on her good eye for 4 hours a day and to wear glasses the rest of the time she was awake.

So Wal-Mart here we come!  She picked them out herself!  Personally I think she looks super smart.  In fact the other two are begging to get their eyes checked.  We go back right after her birthday to check her progress.  Fingers crossed that the eye improves.  I don't want to think that this could lead to surgery.  Ugh.

October apparently means yearbook pictures.  The kids were convinced they would have to wear their school uniforms and it would. be. the. worse. picture. ever.  But surprise surprise (but not to me), they got to wear anything they wanted.  Everyone picked out a pretty colorful ensemble and I wrote the checks and put the envelopes in their backpacks.  We decided on a blue background.  However, the next morning they came downstairs wearing not what we had picked out to go with the blue background.  

 

I decided, no biggie, I will just change the background to grey.  No biggie until I forgot to do it!  I thought of it again right before the first bell and by then it was too late!  I tried to talk myself into believing that I could live with it.  But of course I could not.  Next thing you know, I am running from classroom to classroom changing my forms and rewriting checks.  So much for not sweating the small stuff.  Deep breaths Grayson, deep breaths.  

Lilly was chosen as Student of the Month from her classroom!  She was so excited!!  There was a short assembly and she got a certificate and a token for a free meal.  Her teacher says she is doing really well and he is proud of her.  I, of course, have forgotten how hard third grade is.  I am happy to announce I am doing much better the second time around.  By the time I get Ben through it, I will have it wired!

October also means soccer for us.  Just about the time we were winding our season down last year in Jamestown, we are just starting here!  I thought about signing them up with our local soccer program, but after a quick phone call to the administration I was informed that they could not guarantee that my children would all practice at the same night, field or times.  Also Lilly might have had to practice two or three times a week, with all practices beginning after 6:00pm!  WHAT!?!  No, no thanks.  I found another league that I know for a fact isn't as competitive because we only have practice for a half hour before our one game a week.  All on Saturday, all on the same field and sometimes two children are playing two different games on field right next to each other!  SCORE!!  Another indication that this isn't the "A" league is the coaches give out a medal to at least one child every week.  Lilly and Lucy were selected the very first week.

Remember my moon flowers?   I also planted some grapevine hyacinth.  Isn't it so pretty?!  It smells so good too!  

Another pretty funny thing that we did this month was participate in a national PTA program called Reflections.  I had never heard of it before but essentially the students decide on the category and submit an entry.  Originally they all wanted to draw a picture of an animal.  I told them that was not the most creative of ideas, not to mention the easiest and therefore the most likely to be saturated with entries.  The theme this year was "Believe." I talked Lucy into taking a photograph.  Lilly decided to make a movie and Ben wanted to do an interpretive dance.  I swear I had very little input other than talking them out of doing the drawing.  Their entries are below.

Lucy's picture of our Basil plant re-rooting

Now I will admit I "helped" Lilly decide on what she should film.  One Sunday there were about a million dragon flies all around our neighborhood.  I am not exaggerating!  It was kind-of freaky.  Like Biblical-locust-infestation freaky.  But it was pretty cool and I mentioned to Lilly it would make a neat video.  She agreed and within minutes was laying down in the grass trying to get super close to one of them in order to record it with my phone.  With Ben the only thing I did was find the song he wanted and press record.  I am sure the PTA committee is going to have a hard time with the judging! HA HA HA

This is what happens when you are waiting for your game to start and you apparently have better balance then you do sense.

 But it isn't all fun and games at the soccer field.  They actually did play!

Mommy even got in on the action!  I found an over-30 women's league to play in.  I must say it really does feel good to kick the ball around again.

The last week of October was "Red Ribbon Week" and full of different dress up days to celebrate ways to be drug free.  The last day of week was a super hero themed day.  Ben was easy.  The girls however, proved to be a bit more difficult.  I had thought they could just wear one of Ben's MULTIPLE super hero shirts, but I am not really sure why I thought it would be that easy.  In the end I dug out the colored duct tape and fashioned these shirts.
 

 
We hit up a pumpkin patch the weekend before Halloween.  Of course they had been dying to buy some pumpkins for WEEKS!  I tried to explain to them in this heat you really should wait until the last possible minute to buy the pumpkins unless you wanted an orange puddle on your door step, but you know kids, they don't listen!  

I drive/run by this house every day.  Pretty sure we will be bypassing it on Halloween.

I insisted that we carve the pumpkins on the 30th this year.  EVERY year we are scrambling to carve them on the 31st.  EVERY year it is a problem.  So this year I was determined to not have to deal with that stress.  Yeah me!  I think they turned out pretty good.

Ben decided early on this year he wanted to be a blue ninja.  So we were able to pick up his costume fairly early.  Of course he ripped the masked taking it off the hanger BECAUSE HE WOULD NOT WAIT 5 MINUTES SO I COULD HELP HIM!!!  But because Mommy loves him, she (1) didn't lose her mind, (2) was able to sew the foam back together, and (3) banished the costume in the closet as punishment for him not listening.  No one ever said being a blue ninja was easy.

Likewise, Lilly was sold on being Princess Leia.  I thought I might be able to talk Ben into doing either Darth Vader or Boba Fett.  No go. 

Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.  There is always one in every bunch.  Unfortunately for me, it is pretty much always Lucy.  She originally wanted to be a purple fairy.  BORING!  One of her good friends was going as Alice in Wonderland so I asked her if she wanted to be the Cheshire cat?  You would have thought I was asking her to go nude.  In fact I tried to sell the whole crowd on doing characters from the book.  The Mad Hatter, the white rabbit, Queen of Hearts, Tweedledee and Tweedledum.  Blank stares of horror.  Fine! Whatever.  So we buy the purple fairy costume.  Two weekends before Halloween Lucy decides she does indeed want to be the Cheshire Cat.  Well great!  There are no costumes to be found.  So mommy had to get creative.  

I tried to get her to hold a cutout of the classic grin on a straw, but she said she couldn't be bothered to do that.  Jim still has no idea what she was dressed up as.  But she was happy so that is all that matters.

A little pre-trick or treating fun

They were so much fun last year, I bought more!!

We are ready!

So off we go with our friends to hit up the neighbors for candy.  Despite the fact that the kids had been eating candy since 8:00am at school they were excited about getting more.  The blue ninja, not so much.  After about 6 houses he asked if we were done.  Uh Oh.  Jim, wisely took him back to the car.  Unfortunately for Ben we didn't abort soon enough.  An hour later as we were getting ready to load up, he started projectile vomiting.  The angle I had looked like he was aiming for the passenger seat of my car.  By the time I came around the back of the car he had backed up to the grass.  I slowly turned around to survey the damage.  WHEW!  He missed the interior of the car by inches.  A not-so-great ending to our Happy Halloween!