Slow September

The last few months have flown by, but I thought September would never end! It didn't help that I was excited for our 10th anniversary at the end of the month! And that we've been keeping a certain secret about a certain family vacation! We've planning on telling them at FHE tomorrow. It's been a busy month with back to school and back to preschool. We're all doing great, except Steve's been struggling getting his research paper done. Hopefully he'll get over his block soon and the next few classes will cruise along. Here's my typical pictorial look of the month with commentary by yours truly!

Eden spotlight: Here's a fun ritual Eden has with her daddy every night. After watching 2 episodes of Curious George we go find daddy studying in his cave. He gets a kiss on both cheeks, the chin, nose and forehead. Sometimes she gives him double if she doesn't think they were good enough. And lately she's been making sure they are "Big one!" kisses!
She LOVES posing for the camera! That is when she hasn't stolen the camera to take a million pictures of random things around the house!
Eden and I spent a couple hours with Grandma Tanner. It sure was weird to see her house almost empty! But she was upbeat and showed me all the albums of Grandpa that people had made. We talked about the books she was reading and I showed her the game I'd made with all the milk caps she'd saved for me over the years. She was thrilled. We also went outside and I showed Eden that fruit can actually grow on trees. She picked a peach and a plum. Of course, then she wanted to pick everything around. Luckily she decided on leaves on a bush. We also got to pick a few tomatoes from the garden. Ever since our visit, Eden's been talking about Great-Grandma and constantly wants to go visit her!
She always insists on wearing her sunglasses in the car. She's such a diva! She's also speaking in much longer sentences and is getting easier to understand. She's growing up.
We found two of these princess pull out couches at yard sales lately. The girls have had a lot of "Sleepovers" on them. Eden loves to take naps on them as well. The funny thing is that NO MATTER where I put her to bed, I ALWAYS find her somewhere else later! Here she is nicely tucked into Emily's princess bed after I nicely tucked her into her own bed!
Ella loves it when I suggest we do fancy hair for church!!
Ella also is quite the artist - here's a cute family pic she drew.
The girls were THRILLED to get a package from Japan. We looked at all the stamps and counted them and did lots of boring educational stuff until they INSISTED we open it already! It took us a few minutes to figure out what our surprise gift from grandma was. I told the girls it was a turtleneck for a giraffe. But we soon figured out it was 3 mermaid tails for them and 3 for their barbies! They put them on right away and loved being mermaids!
They also loved their surprise package from mom. I finally broke down and bought these magnet shapes I've been eyeing for awhile. Luckily I found a pretty good deal. They've spent countless hours with them already!
After our circus preschool unit, we had a parent day to show off some of the things we learned. I rented a cotton candy machine again. We had kind of a fiasco, but it turned out ok. We started out with a broken machine. The guy we rented it from came late the night before and brought it back saying he fixed it. When I tried it before preschool it was still broken. I couldn't get ahold of him so I started calling local stores looking for cotton candy to buy. Finally I called Steve in a panic and he left work to search for me. I finally got ahold of the guy we rented it from and I insisted he come fix it or run it for me at the parent day. Luckily he brought another one up just in time. Steve arrived at the same time and got it all set up for me and helped me get through the hecticness. Isn't he great!! He always comes through for me! I set it up again after school and we had a cotton candy stand. The girls thought that was totally awesome and they went around finding customers!
The BIG TOP set up in the preschool room. Getting good use out of our childhood circus tent!
I talked Steve into a different kind of anniversary date! I bought tickets for a new zipline in Provo canyon. I was surprised he agreed! We got to go down 5 lines. It was pretty tame, but also a lot of fun!
After getting the hectic-ness of beginning of preschool out of the way, I decided to do some fun some fun stuff with the girls again! I picked them up early on a Friday and we headed to an Expo in Sandy. I let the girls each get a feather put in their hair. They love them and they've lasted until now. Then on an extra early out day, we headed to SLC to go to our favorite place - the Children's Museum. It had been a long time since we last went, but it was still pretty much the same. They had a blast nonetheless. Everything was new to Eden. She'd start playing with one thing until something else exciting caught her eye. She'd run to that yelling, "Mommy look!" We stayed until they closed at 6:00 and went to the food court and had dinner together. It was a fun date.
I've also been trying to use up some expiring gift certificates so we went to Maggie Moos Ice cream twice - once on our real anniversary night and once during Priesthood session. We tried to go to Monkey Island bounce center, but realized they'd closed. Hopefully they'll open again and honor our gift certificates!! I also let the girls try out a Karate class for a week. They had a lot of fun learning to kick and punch. The Senior Master even made me do it the first day! I brought Eden as an excuse the next day! We're going to try a dance class and a gymnastics class before we decide what to enroll in. Emily also going to try out a piano teacher this week. I really want her to get going on that.

The girls were super excited for school crazy hair day! When Eden saw Ella's hair, she insisted on having hair "Up High" too. But it only lasted for a minute until she bumped her head on something and wanted it out!
I went to school at lunchtime to eat with them and everyone was telling Ella how cool her hair was! The girls were thrilled that I came to visit.

I woke up on our anniversary to find pink streamers everywhere. The number 10 on our doors.
I heart you - across the kitchen and living room walls.
And hung across the living room ceiling!
And he brought me home 2 bunches of flowers! We opened our presents to each other before Steve left for work. He surprised me with an iPod touch! I was so lost what to do with it! But I've spent lots of time figuring it out the last few days! We're waiting to hear the announcement this week about the new release to decide if we'll keep this one, or upgrade to the new generation or upgrade to the iPhone. I bought Steve a new zoom lens for his SLR camera. He was surprised. I actually bought him something he wasn't expecting for once!
Ella ran outside with the camera last night to take a picture of this pretty rainbow! No rain, just the rainbow!
We've really enjoyed conference weekend! Steve also took some time today to start decorating for Halloween. He has a ton of Megos that work really well for this holiday. Here's his Ghost Busters surrounding another ghost figure!