Halloween Highlights

We enjoyed a mild Halloween Day today here in Duluth. Here are a few highlights...

Isaac helped me with an afternoon treat project (hidden pumpkin treat surprise):

Plenty of time for brotherly silliness around home in between our activities:

Following an unplanned visit to the park (which weather and energy levels insisted upon), an afternoon excursion to St. Scholastica where we trick-or-treated in the resident halls and participated in some carnival activities in between...

 Our "Thomas the Tank Engine" (for the 2nd year in a row) and our little pumpkin:

 And back home to hand out goodies for our many trick-or-treaters...both of the boys equally enjoyed the many dressed up visitors coming to our door!

Fall Festivities

We've been enjoying Fall these past few weeks and trying to keep up with the falling leaves in our backyard. Fortunately we have a couple of enthusiastic "helpers" to make the chore of raking leaves a little more enjoyable...

Taking a break from the raking...

David watching big brother load the bag full of leaves...

This weekend we picked up our Halloween pumpkins and had some fun decorating them in our own ways...

Papa went the 'ole Jack-o-Lantern route...

The end result, 4 uniquely decorated pumpkins which we'll keep inside until Halloween. Note: Isaac took the picture below of me and our Halloween stash. He has been quite interested in becoming "the photographer" lately...

Had to include this pic of the boys...hard to catch them still these days, let alone together!

D's First Haircut

This weekend David had his first haircut. Being a busy, not-stopping-for-a-second kind of an almost 16-month old, combined with the fact that this would be a "first" experience for him, we weren't exactly sure how it all would go. Turns out having big brother sit next to him (also getting his haircut) was a good distraction. All things considered, David was a very good customer (thanks to his favorite truck book and a taste of his first dum-dum sucker during the process :-)) Check out a few highlights:

Just sitting down - where is this place?

Mmmm...I like haircuts!

Just like a pro

Just for fun, I pulled the pics of big brother Isaac's first haircut (on his 1st birthday), see for yourself:

Seems like something in the mouth was the trick both times around! Milestones are so bitter-sweet!

AWANA Prayer Card

I picked up Isaac from our weekly Wednesday AWANA Clubs at church tonight, and I was handed this prayer card from his teacher:

In case you need help with the words, it reads "Dear God, Thank you for Lighting McQueen. Thank you God that Jesus is strong and He can heal my Dad. Amen" - Isaac Johnson
(Healing "Dad" (Joel) is referring to a severe sprained ankle that Joel received this past weekend while running the Twin Cities 10-mile race)

Faith like a child is a wonderful thing, and tonight was a good reminder of that in its simplest form.

CSS Homecoming

St. Scholastica is celebrating its centennial this year. There's lots going on throughout the year and Isaac and I couldn't stay away from the fun at homecoming. We started with the parade. As you'd expect, many of the "floats" were tossing out candy. The semi truck was carrying the football team. It seemed like they each had a bag of candy. Isaac was pretty much the only kid on the corner. The entire team decided it would be fun to shower this one kid of tons of candy. It was literally raining Tootsie Rolls :) My pockets were more than full after that surprise.

There were a number of indoor events for families. Some of Isaac's favorites were big wheel races on the running track and spending some time in the batting cages!

I did notice there were some folks from CSS with cameras taking in the event. I guess we were in their line of fire a few times. The college compiled this video of some events. See how many times you can spot us between 1:30 and 3:30 (I counted 3 times).

Duluth Airshow

We've been having some good times in Duluth lately. Isaac and I went to the airshow last Saturday (9/22). It was fun but too cold to really enjoy. We enjoyed watching a few of the acts perform and getting up close to some fighter planes, helicopters, and FedEx cargo plane:

There was even a Menards racing truck there...maybe those planes were too loud :)

I hope he's not lost!

After dropping Isaac off at Awana last night Heather, David, and I headed out to our local grocery store to pick up a few things. As we were driving along I noticed a car on the shoulder that looked like it had some kind of monster bike rack on top. As we got closer I could start to see it wasn't a bike, but a high-tech camera...yep, it was a Google Streetview car. I did a quick u-turn to snap some pics. The driver was looking down at something and I joked to Heather when I got back in the car..."I hope he's not lost." That's what you'd call ironic folks :)

I guess we'll look forward to having some new streets on Google Maps. They picked a great time of year to drive around, capturing our fall colors!