A Tootie Ta, A Tootie Ta, A Tootie Taa Taa

Jackie and Amara perform The Tootie Ta...Oliver could hardly wait to join in. 

Thanksgiving

We had a lovely Thanksgiving with Yvette, her whole family, and Beth. Thank you! Below you see Nana entertaining the kids with crafts before dessert (and yes, that's Eliot in a dress), then Beth, Becky, Justin and Yvette. 

Feeding the spaghetti monster

We met up with Amara's new friend Jackie at Discovery on Friday AM. Here you see Amara feeding balls into the spaghetti tubes, Jackie and Eliot lifting the balls into a big tube maze, Amara and Jackie in their make-a-pinwheel class, Amara negotiating with another little girl on planting flowers in the windowboxes of the 'house', Oliver and Amara unpacking groceries in the 'house', Amara ringing up my groceries (I had to pay $26 for a jar of peanut butter!) and flying the helicopter. Good stuff. 

Feast with the Beasts

 Amara and I went to the zoo, where they fed all the animals special treats - oftentimes hidden inside pumpkins. The elephants stomped on all the pumpkins in their habitat, and even ate a couple whole! Our favorite was the cougars although for some reason I didn't take any pictures. They received paper mache turkey pinatas hidden in the trees. They lept into the trees, batted them out of the trees and then ripped them apart to get the raw meat inside. Yum.

The picture below is the lynx, the elephants, and then our own little beast on the slides.

Daddy's little helper

It may strike you a bit odd that the post of us raking leaves would come at a later date than the post of us playing in the snow, but you would be thinking logically and rationally and the weather will have none of that...on a related note, several ski areas opened this past weekend. I guess it's officially winter...or maybe not yet? 

Guess what it did at our house this weekend?