This afternoon Kate tries to open the front door and the knob comes off in her hand and drops to the floor. She turns around slowly, looks down at the knob and says to me, "I'll get a towel for you."

Have I mentioned that Kate and I are having a good time in the afternoons?

This is from the weekend, Kate showing off what may be her first ever ponytail.

We went apple picking with friends yesterday. What a perfect fall day!

Blue skies

I just uploaded photos to help me remember what we've been up to these past couple weeks. The first one? A dead squirrel. We found it on our walk last week and the girls, after staring at it and speculating on the cause of death, wanted me to take a picture of it. I didn't have the camera so they agreed that after Molly got on the bus, Kate and I should walk back with the camera and see if it's still there. It was. Mmmm.

The best part was that Kate was confusing the words "dead" and "dried out" (which the squirrel wasn't, by the way) and so later on our walk she pointed up into a tree and told me there were "wet squirrels" running around.

Anywho ... it's been so beautiful this week and last week. Well, every day except Saturday when I dragged my family to the Honey Harvest Festival at Tinker Park in the cold rain. Kate was terrified the moment we walked in the door by a human in bee costume and Jim had to take her out in the rain. But Molly and I had a good time. :)

We had a girl day Sunday at the sheep and wool festival with Anna and Lucy.

Now we're back to the school week again. Molly's enjoying kindergarten. The only thing she hasn't liked so far was gym class on the first day. The second time she loved it and now she loves everything. I don't blame her for being skeptical of this particular gym class, though. The stuff she shows me strikes me as a very thinly veiled attempt to keep the kids from getting fat. The teacher makes them run, do crunches, even jumping jacks. Sure, the crunches are called spaghetti (when they lie out straight) and meatballs (when they curl up) and they say the letters of the alphabet while doing jumping jacks. But still. Really? No games? No obstacle courses? Given the opportunity won't any 5-year-old burn calories without even trying? Apparently the childhood obesity panic has reached down into kindergarten. This is one of my pet peeves ever since I read this article in Brain Child Magazine about childhood obesity.

Of course, you can never fully trust the account of a kindergartener about what goes on at school. One day she told me her classed lined up and went outside and came right back for no reason. It wasn't until much later that, out of the blue, she asked, "Mommy, what's a fire drill?"

Anyway, Kate went down for a rare afternoon nap today so I'm going to squeeze in as much stuff into this quiet time as I can. Hooray!

First Day

Everything went great.  Molly can't wait to go back tomorrow!