Pumpkin Pickin'

The weather has been crazy around here the last few days.  The rain has pelted down, sometimes sideways and last night a little after midnight there was a clap of thunder so loud it woke most of the people in Gig Harbor.  Today it's been alternating between pickling rain and shocking bright sunshine.  In fact when I was driving home from picking Cannon up at school I was wearing my sunglasses while running my windshield wipers.  Crazy!

Anyways, our neighbors, Sue and Ken, had invited us yesterday to come pick pumpkins in their yard but we weren't able to find a window without rain to do it.  Today as I brought everyone home from school we were having a moment of sunshine and so I quickly ushered the kiddos all across the street to harvest pumpkins. 

On a whim, Sue had planted one pumpkin plant this past spring and it ended up producing 9 beautiful orange pumpkins.  Lucky lady!  I've never had success with pumpkin plants.  Since they don't have kids, and I think they kind of like mine, they asked us over to help with the harvest.

Ken and Sue's pumpkin patch

 

 

 Emmy, London and Cannon all picked their pumpkins, then an extra for me. 

 

Emmy pushing our stash home.

Our pretty pumpkins!

The best one, though, was the "pumpkin pi".  Ken noticed several weeks ago as this pumpkin grew that it had a naturally occuring scar on it that looks amazingly like the sign for pi (as in the number, you know, 3.14?)  Pumpkin pi, anyone???

My birthday

Thanks to all who called and sent cards for my birthday - I had a beautiful day with my family despite the weather cancelling my plans for a five mile hike.  Instead I had breakfast in bed prepared by Emmy and London and supervised by Stevie.  In the afternoon we played a family game of Monopoly and had sushi for dinner.  I even had a birthday cake with candles that said I was 71 - ha! now you'll never know my true age...

Cannon's first water polo game

Cannon has decided to join the high school water polo team this year.  He's always loved swimming and this is a natural extension.  I'm thrilled he's playing since I used to do the statistics for my high school water polo team and actually enjoy watching this sport. 

The Gig Harbor High School has not had a boys water polo team since the 90's but have resurrected the sport this year so all the guys are learning together.  Strangely, they already had a girls water polo team...  Of course it's not an "official" school sport because of Title 9, which if you are not familiar, says that there has to be an equal number of girl sports and boy sports so until the girls want to add football or something, boys water polo has to exist as a "club".  Come on.

After a couple weeks of grueling practices, they kicked off their season last night with a home game against the second best team in the state.  Hmmm.  Actually the coach specially arranged for this so that they could learn and experience what a champion team looks like.  I guess I see his logic.

Cannon is on the JV team and their game didn't start until 8:00.  Steve brought the kiddos up to see for a while but then took them home for bed about half way through the game.  I stayed around to see the team surprisingly hold their own.  I think the final score was 8-4, not bad for their first game against a really tough team.

He had to dress up for school on game day.

Nail check - they have to have trimmed finger and toe nails!

That's Cannon with the ball

Cannon, #2, waiting to kick off

I love his face!

 And in case you missed it when I posted it on Facebook, this is his suit -

Oh, boy, did Emmy and London give him a hard time about it!!!  But Cannon just took it all in stride and asked if he could wear his Speedo for the swim unit he's doing in gym!  Ha!

Beauty shots

Caught these cool shots of the Tacoma Narrows bridge as we were driving on a foggy day last week.  My camera was inadvertantly on some funky setting which made these turn out super cool. (And, no, I wasn't driving!)

You can see the fog at the bottom.

A funny sign

So as we were driving to London's soccer game in Tacoma last week, we went through a very Hispanic part of town and saw this sign.  Just made me laugh!  Never knew Jesus had a day job...

Emmy's birthday

Happy birthday to my sweet baby girl who turned 7 on Sunday!  How could it be seven years already?  And how could she have gotten so big and so sassy already???

Enjoying donuts for breakfast.

Present time

Emmy wanted Legos for her birthday this year.

The birthday girl and her daddy

Putting together one of the Legos.

We celebrated her day by having a dog-themed paw-ty in the afternoon.  We invited 10 of her friends to enjoy the day and boy did they have fun!  It was an amazing day with lots of sunshine and warm temps, which was good as I had planned for the party to be outside.

We started by painting everyone's faces as dogs.  Thanks to my friend Jess, who helped turn everyone into a puppy.  The look was completed with some dog ears on headbands that I had made for them.

The then all went to the "Adoption Center" to pick out a dog to adopt, a basket for it to sleep in, a blanket, and a toy.  They then got to make a collar for the dog and a certificate of adoption.

Playing with their newly adopted dogs.

Once through with the adoption, I had the kids go outside for a snack which I served in dog bowls.  My neighbor had recently given me a new pooper scooper so I used that as a serving scoop! 

Since it was hot and sunny, they all went inside the tent to eat.  It was too cute to see all 12 of them lined up in the tent eating their "pupcorn", dogs in a blanket, puppy chow and dog bone shaped graham crackers.

After the snack, Steve pulled out his giant "dog catcher" net that he and Cannon had made.  He ran around try to capture the dogs.  The kids LOVED this game and ran all over the yard screaming and laughing.

Taking shelter from the dog catcher in the dog cage.

We then moved on to cake and presents.  I'm kinda proud of the border collie cake I made for Emmy, it turned out much better than I had hoped for.

 

Finally, we had the kids run the agility course that Steve and Cannon had designed: zig zag through cones, jump through a hoop, jump over two obstacles, dash through a tunnel (the tent), into a wheelbarrow that Cannon pushed and dumped them into the dog cage.  Again the kids just loved this game and ran it over and over.  We ran out of time to play the other games I had planned (poop scoop relay and who could drink-like-a-dog the fastest.) 

Through the hoop

Cannon pushing the wheelbarrow.

It was an awesome party and everyone had fun, even Stevie who got to hang with our friend Chris and Cannon who hung out with Sydni from down the street.

Cannon and Sydni having a pom pom fight with the left over craft supplies.

Happy birthday, beautiful girl!!!

Showing off her new border collie shirt.

London's first soccer game

London loves soccer and his natural speed in running helps his playing ability.  He missed playing last year because we had just moved and missed the sign ups so this year he's been greatly anticipating the start of the season since, like, February!!!  The games officially kicked off on Saturday with an away game in Tacoma.  The play was energetic and the team played well, but let's just say we had all hoped for a better ending...

See, the other team was all Hispanic, and not to sound stereotypical, but soccer was definitely more in their blood than in our honky white team's.  Steve was pretty sure that some of those kids were playing soccer in the womb.  Yes, the Lightening (or is it Junior Sounders?  They keep changing the name of the team) were defeated by an unknown amount - we stopped keeping track after a while.  But the boys played well and had fun and I'm sure will go on to be quite successful.

Go Lightening Junior Sounders!