This week was our Lily’s 8th birthday! Our sweet Lils is such a great girl. Griffin absolutely loves her. He always likes to feed her breakfast and dinner, let her in and out, take her on walks or bike rides. Every night before bed he lies on the floor next to her, then gives her a hug and a kiss before telling her “you can go now Yils” and she prances off to bed. She’s just the best and she’s been out on the road trips with us more now that she’s our only dog. She’s enjoyed several trips to Grandma and Grandpa Beilstein’s and Grandma and Grandpa Armstrong’s! She got a special nylabone and cupcake, and Finn, Debbie, and Sam stopped off at the store and got her a special lovie too :).  It was a lot of arts and crafts this week with Pumpkins! Painting ceramic pumpkins, real pumpkins, carving pumpkins and roasting the seeds – it was a fun time for Finn with Debbie. I love that he gets so excited in the morning when I tell him Debbie will be here soon.  He says “yay, yay, yay, Miss Debbie is almost here” and does a little dance. 

Thursday I surprised Griffin at school for the book character week “parade”. I hadn’t told him I was coming and when he saw me his face lit up so big and he kept waving. So sweet. His class theme were books by Mo Willems about pigs and elephants, so the boys dressed up in gray and had elephant puppets they made out of bags. 

On Friday night we headed to the Jerome High School Football game for Senior night to see Cameron Howard walk across the field as a Senior in the marching band.  Wow, time flies! We stayed through half time to watch the band performance – they are great! Cam had quite the cheering section.  Here is Cam with Finn this year on the left, and two years ago in 2014 on the right. I’ve been enjoying snuggles with Finn lately. We had a long afternoon after preschool on this day and he fell asleep in the car on the way home from the mall.  I let him sleep for awhile and then got him out of his carseat. That usually wakes him up, but this day I carried him upstairs and was going to put a show on for him to just rest a bit more and he didn’t wake up for another hour until I woke him up! Love these snuggles.
On Saturday afternoon we headed to Indian Run Falls in Dublin to do a Fall Family photo shoot with my sister. We decided to take Lily this year too. She’s been in other photos with us but they’ve always been at our house. I thought it would be pretty smooth – and after the first 10 minutes, it mostly was, but oh nelly was she excited and choking herself to death to go investigate any and everything. As it turns out the photos went well and Amy snapped some really great pics that we are thankful to have. This year we even got a couple of just me and her :).  And we also did a cousins session. The results of which look amazing compared to the chaos behind the scenes. Even bribing with pizza and ice cream was a stretch at times! And I still do owe them a surprise “treat” that I bribed them with to cooperate. Rowan was quick to call me on that at the end of our session :).  Here are a few of my outtakes.  And we are getting excited for our upcoming trip to the cabin. One night when I was out Finn and Daddy made a pretend log cabin in the basement.