Avery's loose tooth FINALLY fell out!!! It had been loose for soo long! We first noticed it was loose on October 12... and almost a month later- November 11, it finally came out!

For those of you who might not know, Avery has an extremely low pain tolerance... or an extremely high capacity for drama and emotions, depending on how you look at it. So I knew there was no way anyone would get near her mouth to pull it out or that she would pull it out.

She was just wiggling away. Yesterday, as she was talking to me, it was flapping back and forth!!! ridiculous! So she was munching away on a fruit leather, "heard a crunch", and it plopped out!!! It bled for a while (she had previously been afraid that the bleeding would hurt) and she wasn't scared at all!!! The one next to it is loose too, so we'll see if that one takes a month to fall out!!!Showing how she could stick her tongue through it!Showing Oliver her new skill!!Oliver trying on dad's childhood hat... too bad you can't see that it says Jeff on it! In other news, we got our first snow!! Its actually still on our grass 3 days later... unusual for here!! Usually it melts right away fast, but its been pretty chilly.

And Avery was sick. Missed 2 days of school this week (which I think she sort of liked!) with some sort of weird virus. She just had a fever and a headache. weird.
Finally, we've got the obligitory leaf pictures for the fall!!! This raking didn't really result in the actual picking up of any leaves, just jumping- and Avery has perfected "swimming" in the leaves! Hopefully we'll get them up before it snows! They were just so darn excited, I took a lot of pictures... so get ready!!

At this point, they were pretty much done jumping and had moved on to burying each other. Little cuties... but seriously, Oliver... what is with that smile??
The first jump!!!
Now Ollie's starting to get into it!!






I love Oliver's face in this one... having such fun! And yes, Avery IS, in fact, wearing pink cowboy boots!

Along the lines of thoroughly celebrating Halloween, we went to a friend's house to carve pumpkins!
Ooohhh, the concentration...So proud! He wanted to hold his pumpkin while we lit all of the other ones. And finally, the main event!!!! We went trick-or-treating in our friend's neighborhood. It was the type of neighborhood where they hand out the full-sized candy bars! It was jam-packed with kids and it was so fun to hang out with our friends! Here are the kiddos before we headed out...Avery's favorite development over the last month is that she is now a member of a saddle club!!! We heard about it at Halloween with the Horses and signed her right up! It last for 3 hours on Saturdays and they learn all about horses. How to take care of them, groom them, feed them... and some riding!!! She loves it! This was right when we got there and she got to walk through that barn- as she did, all of the horses poked their little heads out... again... she was in heaven!!!We were slightly early, so she got to meet Marshmallow before everyone else got there! They have high school and college kids that are the "trainers" and she LOVED her trainer!!!

This isn't the best picture, but it was taken with her trainer's phone... but here she is getting ready to ride Major!
We're baaaacckkk!!! We took an unplanned blogging break and now we've got a lot of catching up to do. First, we went to the Fall Festival at the Littleton Historical Museum with Jeff's co-workers. The kids had a great time!!!




Up next was Halloween with the Horses! As you can imagine, this is Avery's favorite event. She got to ride horses about 8 times, saw some cool horse shows, and got to go trick-or-treating through a barn!
So Avery started off on a pony (above) and then moved to a full sized horse still lead by a person on foot (below).
And then, she felt brave enough to be lead by another person on a horse!!! I couldn't believe it! She looked so small and was so far away... who was going to catch her if she slipped off??! :) But she was in heaven! Up next was Avery's Halloween parade at school. Here's Oliver and I waiting for the parade to go by.
In the parade!!
At the party, Oliver found some stuff to do. (urgh- what to do about that smile!!!)

OK, I'm off to work on Halloween Part II.