some more from the last bit of october …

the colours from the mountains came down to the valley via our neighbourhood in the hills. some snaps from a bike/scooter ride around the block:

some sentences mo wrote:

weekly physical therapy for august, and working on standing at the library:

a tiny bit of progress on setting up the house…so so excited to have a playroom (and such a spacious kitchen)!

best room in the house – the kind of gross old basement bedroom that we turned into our art room! lots of creations were made there from our first day living in our home. check out the ghost mask mo made – spooky!

we loved discovering and attending free art and lego classes at the provo city library:

gabriel had a presentation / performance at his preschool. it was so, so cute – all about the things the kiddos learned during their unit about “the farm”! gabe’s preschool has been one of the very greatest blessings in our new life in provo. it is everything i could ever possibly wish up in a preschool.

after six autumns living in the uk and missing all the festivity of fall that feels so american to me, i was excited to take the boys to a pumpkin patch one afternoon. the first one we went to had some fun pumpkins and a big tractor to ride, but was small, and gabriel fell asleep in the car on the way there.

so after we picked a few for carving, mo and i decided to check out another pumpkin patch that came up on google maps. this one was pretty epic with thousands of gourds, a huge corn maze, and a bunch of dinky chintzy rides. the boys were in heaven and we had so much fun!

we got cotton candy and picked out a few extra pumpkins. such good fun.

some craft masterpieces: “the boat” written by moses, the pictures drawn by moses (!!) and gabriel making such great progress in writing his name!

one sunday we decided to go visit the provo temple grounds before going to visit ian’s grandpa. moses asked if he could bike there and daddy said it was a bit too far and hilly. that lit a fire under mo – he was determined to do it! and he triumphantly made it all the way to the temple from our house (with lots of encouragement from mom walking/running along side him 🙂 ).

golden leaves in the temple parking lot and mystical beauty in american fork canyon – we took the much longer but more scenic route home from grandpa’s wright’s 🙂

provo was so so beautiful several days at the end of october after some snowfall in the mornings. it’s so hard to capture, but i tried one day on the way back from preschool dropoff // lighting mo and gabe’s jack-o-lanterns in the windowless storage room downstairs:

two little boys proud of their carvings on the front porch:

making their best spooky faces:

and tossing baby pumpkins for a mid-air shot:

on 28 october, we got to celebrate my dad’s 77th birthday with him! his birthday tradition is to “jump in the leaves” and after many, many years of doing that without my dad, no matter where i was in the world, it was a joy to celebrate with the birthday boy!

my brother eli was out of town but his wife julie and all their kids, as well as my sister saren who was in town to visit her kids that live in provo, joined us with grammie and grandfather to have a wild leaf throwing party at a random church parking lot that we noticed had some good fallen foliage. the sun was really bright, hence the funny faces in these photos, ha! love that my dad, at 77, hesitates zero to wrestle in the leaves with his raucous grandkids.

i ordered our christmas jammies early this year and when they arrived the day before halloween we definitely needed to put them on asap and take them for a little scooter ride around the block 🙂 and then play some driveway basketball in them, of course.

and then it was time for halloween! much, much anticipated in the wright household – coming up next.