This week was Griffin’s Pre-School Orientation on Thursday. This year he is going to be a Tiger and will go to school two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday. I went with him and met his teachers, Miss Jen and Miss Irma, and we played for about a half an hour. It was just a short visit so he could see his classroom and get comfortable with his surroundings. Afterward I thought it would be fun to have a little date together since I was off for the day. We went to First Watch for a nice brunch and then headed for a fun activity at Color Me Mine. Griffin chose a huge Spider Man coin bank and I chose a simple pleated bowl. We both had a lot of fun painting our projects and we will get to pick up the finished projects next week!
It was also a rather noisy week as we got a new roof! It took about two solid days of work, with a crew of about 6 or more guys working all day. I was pretty nervous to pick the shingle color as we have a huge roof and the wrong would look bad, obviously! But I must say, we picked an excellent color! Kevin and I were both quite happy with it as it goes really well with our new paint color and has some flecks of our brick in it as well.
Here are some before photos of our orange-brown roof:
And here are some during and afters with our gray-brown roof and new skylights!
Google just so happened to remind me of the below photo from one year ago. A lot has changed since then – our house color, a new roof, new skylights, and our shrubs out front have grown like crazy! We also planted three new trees this year. I’m excited for next spring already!
Finn had a fun week of play too. He often gets out with Sammy and our neighbors Cole and Cooper early in the week. They have a lot of fun together! He and I ventured to Graeter’s one afternoon with Lily (she had her follow up appointment for her teeth, so she was with us) and she got a pup cup! And we’ve gone on several bike rides this week in our neighborhood. Finn has really been enjoying riding his bike and he is getting to be really great balancing and lifting his feet off the ground for long stretches of time. He’s gotten so much taller that we had to raise his seat up a notch. I remember when we gave him this balance bike he couldn’t stand all the way with his feet on the ground yet!
Griffin also learned how to spell his name this week. I arrived home and he quickly wanted to tell me how he spells his name. He was SO excited. I took a few videos and will post one here so you can here the excitement in his voice. 
In other news we were tasked with choosing a shingle color for our new roof that will be going on soon. It’s quite a big decision to make based off such a small sample! We put the samples outside against the brick a few different times and in different light to see if we picked the same one each time. Stay tuned to see our choice!
And here is a photo I took at Millcreek this week. It was a BEAUTIFUL fall day with perfect temperatures, blue skies, and puffy white clouds!