Pre-Halloween Festivities

As tomorrow is Halloween, the girls' got to dress up at school today. We pulled Caitlyn's costume from last year out since they wanted to make sure that her costume had easy access to use the restroom if it was needed. Here is Caitlyn in our humble little pumpkin patch.

I went back to have lunch with her near the end of her day...which incidentally is around 10:am! Ever have lunch at 10:am? I had to make myself eat and then I was starving before dinner.

Anyway, I got there a little early and they just finished their own little parade around the school grounds and through the offices so that they can see the cute little preschoolers.

It was great timing because I got to help them take a picture her class and teachers.

Then they got to take home goody bags which they got to decorate. In preschool, there is a no candy policy, so she got fruit, juice, fruit snacks and a Halloween pencil...oh, and sugar free cookies.

Emily had a big costume parade with the rest of the school. Caitlyn and I went back to take pictures.

No such luck with a no candy policy for the rest of the school. She got cupcake, cookies, chips, juice and two bags of candy!

I stuck around to take Emily home afterwards and watched her with her little friends. I know she just had a huge sugar rush in her classroom but I've come to realize that she must be the silliest and giggliest girl alive. It was almost embarrassing. Is that really my daughter?

Blog Printing

After a month of working away at my blog book, it is finally finished. I sent it in today for printing. We'll see how it comes out.

I decided to stick with Blurb.com. It seemed like the most used and is fairly priced. They seem to give you some measure of control over the final product. You download the software that they provide to you. Then you put in your blog information and the software automatically "slurps" up all the data and pictures from your blog into a book. Now, you could just submit the book to be published at that point, after finalizing the cover and title page but I didn't care for the results. Basically, they will put each post on a different page (as long as it fits, otherwise it will be printed on more). So even if you only have a sentence or two in your post, it will take up the whole page. Plus, all the pictures are placed in their pre-formatted layouts. Basically, if you have more than a couple of pictures, they end up in little squares on the top or side. So a lot of my pictures got cropped.

I ended up customizing my layout pages quite a bit. So it took me most of this month to complete it while working away at it a little at a time each day. It's a little more work than I expected to put into it but I wanted to be happy with the end product.

We'll see how it comes out when I receive the published book. So I just ordered a soft cover 8x10 book. It came out to 80 pages which costs around $25. But before I finished working on the book, they sent me a coupon for 20% off plus free shipping (which is normally $7 and a bit on the steep side if you ask me). I ended up paying only $21.70 for it. Not too bad.

Playing Catch-up

Just when I think I get the hang of writing regularly on my blog, three weeks go by and I haven't done a thing. At least one of us has been sick on and off since school started back up. Caitlyn has been the healthiest one of us. It's been pretty miserable.

And included in our daily routine is the daily afternoon fight with Emily to get her homework and reading done for the day.

Besides that, we've been working on more unpacking again. I know, 9 months later and we are still at it.

Will it ever be done? I have my doubts. These boxes and actually a bunch more that you can't see were all filled with books and National Geographic Magazines. We ended up sorting through most of them and we forced ourselves to thin out our collection a bit. We gave a few boxes of books away and we took several more boxes to DI. It was quite a stressful experience.

In between spurts of nearly 100 degree weather (in October!), I managed to clean and weed parts of my summer garden to get it ready for fall planting. We already have a bunch of seeds that have germinated. I need to get the rest done hopefully this week before it gets hot again!