Awesome October Highlights

I titled this post Awesome October, mostly because they begin with the same sounds! Haha! And yet when I think about it October was pretty awesome.  We had a lot of awesome fall weather!  We had awesome birthday parties (Carter's and Aubrey's). We had awesome fall parties, a reformation party at our church, a harvest party at a friend's church and friends over on Halloween.

October was also very hard and sad and emotionally overwhelming!  A big announcement was made that our beloved dance studio, Galletta School of Dance would be closing the end of December.  I knew this was a possibility as we found out in June that Miss Lynn, the owner's, husband has stage 4 intestinal cancer.  Even though we knew it might happen it was still absolutely heartbreaking for me and the girls to learn of this news.  It was a good week of deep sorrow and mourning the loss of this amazing school.  A lot of our hopes and dreams and visions of what our girls' future would be like as they grew up and danced and graduated from this dance school are lost.  Some may say well it is not that big of deal, just go find another studio.  But the thing is there are very few options for us (a family of 4 dancers) out there and there is no other studio that does what Lynn did with her performing arts shows!  Lynn is just so creative!  She wrote scripts and choreographed spring shows that were so amazing.  The parts were written specifically for the students she had and they were miked and acting and dancing on stage.  It was just the whole package and why we had chosen this school was for its amazing shows!  Also being a smaller studio the girls were able to have lots of parts in the shows and make strong connections with their small group of friends. It is surreal still a bit as the girls are still dancing there through December and will all be performing in the Nutcracker the beginning of December. The studio will be changing hands and be sold to a studio from Port Orchard called Just for Kicks. We may stay or we may leave and find another studio. We are still unsure of where our girls will land and what studio will be the best fit for our family.  That unknown is HARD, the transition to come will be HARD, the last performance will be HARD!  There is still a lot of hard in the day to day and a lot of hard yet to come surrounding this situation.  We continue to pray for Miss Lynn and her husband as I know this is not the plan or hope they had either.  And I continue to pray that God opens the door and makes it clear where our girls should go dance and that they will continue to find joy and love to dance despite this hard transition to somewhere new.

Well with the hard stuff out of the way I will get on to all the awesome we had in October!!  Carter had a crocodile/alligator birthday party just a few weeks late on Oct. 8th.  It was a beautiful day with fun games and kids and as always a delicious chocolate cake made by Jodie!  Yummy!

That 3 day weekend also ended up being the weekend we graveled our parking pad for our trailer, boat and truck.  It has always been uneven, some grass, and a lot of weeds and been something we have wanted to do. So we decided to take it on and boy was it a big job so rewarding to get it done.  I pulled so many weeds and raked a ton of gravel.  Hans borrowed a friends trailer that is super nice, but weighs 4,000 lbs so when your truck can only haul about 10,000 max you have to take a lot of loads of gravel and the gravel place is a bit of distance from our house.  The morning of the 8th he went to get a load and had a big miscommunication with the man loading the gravel.  He put up 5 fingers wanting 5,000 pounds of gravel and the man gave him 5 TONS!!  Yeah that is  10,000 pounds!  So now he had a trailer weighing in around14,000 pounds so it was an anxious drive back home and hurried effort to get all that gravel off the trailer.  We did get it done and the truck and trailer were not damaged in the efforts.

WE moved the boat shed off the area so we gravel and the next morning found it upside down in the ravine.  It had blown over....ugh!  Hans got it out with only a few holes in the roof and a bent bar or two.  It still works but will one day soon need the roof replaced as it is very brittle.

After that came Aubrey's birthday and birthday party!  See the previous post for details on that.

On the 18th we were having one of those awesome fall days and I wanted to take the girls to a corn maze this year.  Olivia sadly doesn't love doing stuff with as much so she opted to stay home and work on school work.  It was sad to not have her, but the rest of us had a good time.  This was also right after our dance news so it was a good distraction to get outside, get some sun and not think about dance for a bit. They had a bit of trouble growing their corn this year, so the maze wasn't quite as good as in years past, but we still had fun finding all the letters and solving the riddle. Here is the riddle "what do you call two witches that live together?" the answer is Broommates!  Hahaha!



Here are a few random pics that were taken.  I love all the Barbie cities, villages, and homes that are made in our house.  The girls have a lot of fun creating things for their barbies and playing, playing, playing.

Grumdrop costumes!  Aubrey and Raelyn are gumdrops this year and it is super cute!

We also had some fun both with being booed and booing two other families!  First we booed on a night that I was away having a dance mom meeting about the studio situation.  The girls said Stella was barking.  Claire was looking out from the upstairs window but still didn't see who was out there and by the time they got the door open our friends that had booed us were already gone.  They found a box of cookies with a note saying we had been booed.  When I arrived home and saw it the next morning I said, "Of course it was the Lamars!"  It had their touches all over it.  From the cute box, the handwriting that said Tolfs, and the pretty decorated boo card.  So we decided to put together some boo bags and have a little fun too.  So we put together these two bags with mini pumpkin cream cheese muffins and candy.  We decided to boo two friends the Kopps and McLaughlins. We thought we were going to be tricky and boo the Kopps while they were gone at a football game but when we arrived they were home.  We were mostly dressed in black...except me in a bright pink sweatshirt so me and the little girls watched from the road while Hans and Olivia and Claire dropped the present.  At McLaughlins Olivia had to run up there twice as the dog started barking at her and they actually opened the door and looked out the first time.  Then she had success in dropping the package.  When Laura got it she said, "Oh Janea! We got a package."  And the girls were so confused about what a "Janea" was.  One thought it was a swear word, one thought it was the dog, and the other, thought it was food.  Really it was her friend Janea...haha!





The weekend before Halloween we went to two parties.  One was at a church that we usually attend their party every year.  My girls don't play the games and we bring home hardly any candy!  Oh well!  The girls dressed up as Toby Mac, a cowgirl, a cheerleader and a ballerina.  It was kind of last minute finding their costumes and Claire in the end was not happy with her costume at all. We had lots of friends there so it was nice to get out and get my mind off our own Reformation Party that was coming the next night and off the whole dance situation.

Toby Mac, Cheerleader and Ballerina



Holden and Raelyn

Aubrey make the perfect cheerleader with her flexibility

Ballerina, Cowgirl, and Cheerleader

Toby Mac and Unicorn Fran

The next night was our church's second Reformation Party.  The first year was a lot of work to put together because we had never done one.  This year was still a bit of work, but easier in a lot of ways since it was our second time around. The set up was the better the games were better because we removed all of the ones that did not work well the year before.  The turn out was not as good as the year before which was a bummer.  But we still had a lot of fun and it was a bit more relaxed for me.

This side was all the Martin Luther themed booths.  We had Katie's Convent, Alms for the Poor, and Tossing the Papal Bull into the fire, and fishing for the 5 Solas.

Here was the little information area that I set up.

We had two female reformers share about their lives this year.  Hannah and Beatrice did a great job.  Then a story was read to the kids about Martin Luther.

Here are the Calvin booths on the other side which were all new this year.  Guess where the placard is at,  Calvin's qualifications for a wife, and a ring toss for the ideas Calvin was fighting for.

 We ended up ending early because there was so few kids.  We cleaned up and put the chairs back and were out of there and home by 7:30.  It was crazy! A last minute pic of me, Jodie and Ashia.

And Hans vacuuming in his costume was awesome!

Since I didn't get many pics at the event when we got home I asked the girls to take a few pictures before they changed.

Claire at the last minute did not like her princess costume so we decided she could be a jester in this old ballet costume. I think she pulled it off.

My little princesses!

On Sunday after dance practice we decided we better get our pumpkins carved.  Olivia was too tired and opted out of carving...little stinker.  I think she went to bed early.  The girls did great this year and did most of the carving on their own.  I helped Raelyn still but we didn't stick any faces in pumpkins this year for the first time ever...sniff, sniff!

A cat on a pumkin (Claire's), a ghost (Raelyn's), and a pretty black cat (Aubrey's)

This was after our last garden day of cleaning up the weeds in the garden. These two buddies can be pretty silly!

Halloween shirts!



On Halloween the dance company girls did a flash mob to the thriller song in downtown Poulsbo where they pass out candy at the store fronts.  It was a nice night and we headed down to watch them.  I thought the younger girls would want to trick or treat while we waited, but they were too shy and decided we had too much candy from our reformation party (I let the kids fill up bags of candy since we had not so many kids and tons of candy this year!). After the flash mob they handed out candy cans with a dollar off coupon to our Nutcracker show. It was a great way to advertise for our show.

Lots of people, loved these dinosaurs.

Cold little cheerleader

Cute little black kitty!

Claire and Amelia and Breanna

Part of the flash mob crew.

Jamie's little boy

Another group shot

We left shortly after that and headed home to have dinner and games with the Kopps.  We didn't trick or treat this year which was kind of sad, but fun to hand out candy to the few trick or treaters we had from the neighborhood.  I got a few pics of the girls before the Kopps arrived.



I don't know why I can't find the group pic with the Kopp kids...will have to work on that!

The bobcat twins...lol!