Rewind...

First and foremost thank you to my friends and family for your support and prayers and words of encouragement...i/we cherish every one them! please continue to pray for my mom-for both strength and peace-i will post her final results on monday after she meets with the surgeon to make her decisions as to what surgery she will need to have and then her surgery will be on thursday. i will be with her thursday and spend the night in the hospital with her and nichole is going to drive to st. louis on thursday evening (when she returns from her business trip) and she is going to try to stay through Thanksgiving weekend.

now, it is time for me to catch up my blog a bit. halloween has come and gone but i never posted pics. since it was the youth hunt weekend chris took bradley hunting, so this year bradley didn't dress up. Lainie was a pink lady-from grease-now her favorite movie(good girl)...and tristan was indiana jones. the weekend before halloween we had trunk or treat at church...it was so much fun and one of the winning trunks did a leave it to beaver theme-it was hilarious! a few friends from school joined us this year and a group of girls dressed up as cat burgalers.....-their costumes were great! it was pretty cold-so it made the trick or treating from trunk to trunk move along a little faster.

fast forward to the bridgeport halloween blockparty-such a fun night, all of the kids dressed up in their costumes-murray was cotton candy-so cute!-.....we had a costume parade and then they had a pumpkin decorating contest and they had a few games planned for the kids to play...the adults enjoyed good conversation around the fire pits and the magees set up a big screen in their front yard and the kids all set up their sleeping bags and watched the great pumpkin charlie brown. check out this wagon-it is my friend terri's - she has triplets (who are now 7) and jacob (who is 6)-this was how she toted her brood around when they were younger!..now the kids love to pull eachother around in it. the next night was halloween-the weather was perfect-in the 70's in fact i think we worked up a sweat trick or treating around the neighborhood. we had dinner with our neighbors outside to kick off the evening and at dark set out to trick or treat-we picked up quite a few friends along the way-i think we had a group of about 15 people by the end of the night. the kids got way too much candy! sunday was chris's birthday-they came back early from hunting and we had a small family dinner with chris parents, matt, jamie and alayna, amanda and matt, nathaniel, grandma dolan and my mom. i made a few soups, cornbread and chris's favorite dessert-blackberry cobbler. since chris is going to a mountaineering school and ice climb in colorado, in december, and climbing mt. rainier in the spring, everyone got him either gift cards to rei or something off of his climbing registry there. he has a few more things to get to be totally ready for his trip and i think he is getting pretty excited and i am excited for him.

the next weekend i took tristan and bradley and bradley's friend wesley to the st. louis blues hockey game. this was tristan and my first time ever to attend a hockey game..hockey is pretty fun to watch! we went with the cub scouts-so tristan was really excited about getting a badge from the blues. and what excited the boys even more was that cam janssen was signed to the blues from the new jersey devils at the end of last season and cam was a good friend of my brother sam's. during the funeral and the memorial bbq's that we have for sam, the boys got to hang out with cam and play washers with him and nervously they asked him for his autograph-he was very sweet to the boys. the boys are especially proud to know cam because he is the fighter-and we missed his first big fight of the year by one night...although he did not let us down because he tried to start about 5 fights the night that we were there-and the boys would jump up and yell and cheer him on as he was about to bash some other players face in!...and they bragged to all of the cub scouts around us-so by the end of the night all of these little 6 year old boys were saying "where's #55, we wanna see him fight"-gee was i so proud!

lainie had her last soccer game of the season last weekend-we were up at 7 a.m. and it was a cool 35 degrees at 7:40 a.m. as they did their coin toss on the field to see which team would start. we were all bundled up in coats, hats and gloves and had our coffees in hand to keep us warm-the girls were troopers and played a great final game...it may have had something to do with the fact that we bribed them with lamars donuts after the game! oh and i can't forget 2 weekends ago lainie had ella spend the night and they put on quite a show for me-after a visit to the local libby lu store (in the clearence section) we ended up with $7.00 dresses-that matched- and pop star dress up kits...i thought that rachel would kill me because the girls wanted to wear the ensemble the next morning to church-i complied but would not let them wear the hair!-they danced around all night singing hannah montana and the cheetah girls songs and then on monday night called eachother to plan out their outfits for school on tuesday-guess what they wore.....and how about the rock star one-handed glove ella has (think madonna)-lainie's popstar dressup didn't come with a glove so she wore a fingerless winter glove to church and school-just to make sure they matched!

one more pic to leave you with...the kids have a halloween parade at heir school every year followed by the halloween parties-and the teachers get in the spirit too...this is coach w-the p.e. teacher at lainie and tristan's school-is this a great costume or what? everyone was cracking up!