Christmas joy

the evening started out so nice...my boys were even matching (not intentional, but cute nonetheless)....


and then we saw santa claus or as jake calls him "Noah". an experience that jake will not soon forget.

i really love these guys!

They are "On the Rocks" an acapella (spelling?) group from University of Oregon and they are hillarious.

jake loves...

his animals! we all know that cows are his favorite, but he occasionally distributes his time with the other members of his farm. he feeds them, they kiss, when they fall down he rocks them saying "ohhh" and then asks "okay?" with his head tilted to the side. his animals also have to go "night-night" and he makes sure to snore for them and then he says, "wake-up" and helps them stand up. i love to just watch him, but he usually ends up wanting me to play too. i don't mind that either.

the blue shape is where they eat, but of course you already knew that.

when he goes to bed, he gets to choose two animals to take with him. it works like a charm. who needs a soft cuddly stuffed animal when you have a hard animal toy to leave imprints on your face?!?

corn maze

we took jake to the corn maze, but funny thing was, we never went in. we just played around in the kids play area. we had a lot of fun, but ran out of day light. what is it with these short days???

go ahead and make fun of his hat that is too small. i hadn't tried it on him yet this year and guess what...his head is bigger than last year. i don't know how that happened. it looks like one of those little jewish caps (minus the skull and bones of course).


the first (and best as far as jake is concerned) thing that jake found was the cow.

he could have stayed there the whole time. who knew cows could be so exciting?

you would think that after seeing all of grandpa's cows all the time, a single calf would not be all that exciting, but there is never quite enough cow time.

what is he looking at you may be asking yourself. well, we had moved on, but he is looking at the cow.

the goats were okay too.

running through the kids hay maze was awesome! jake loved it and we loved that he was somewhat confined.

all tuckered out, but we will go again next year....hopefully during the day.

a look at halloween

we kept it simple for halloween. jake was a monkey and he didn't love his costume, especially his hat. i really should have dressed him like a cow. he would have liked that.
we went trick or treating to grandma's and then went to the neola carnival. i think that he had a good time.

at grandma's he was more interested in her toy cows than he was the candy.

"get this banana hat off my head!"

"just leave me with my cows and i will be happy."

jake loved all the games at the carnival and matt was such a great sport to take him around to everything. they even won a cake in the cake walk.

this may be what we are doing again next year. so nice to be inside, warm and dry (it was raining outside). i have great memories from the neola carnival when i was a kid. i love that it is still going on and it is the same as it was then.

a day of fencin'

at the end of september, us locals gathered at my parent's farm for a good ol' day of fencin'. we had lots of fun working with the family and doing all we could to keep those darn cows in. hope it helped.

after a day of hard work, this is how some of us looked:

ty

mia

emma

jake

grandpa

ty (and carrots, i think)

koy and mia

ty and sai with blake in the background

jake

there is nothing like a good day of hard work. i am so grateful for grandma and grandpa rass and their farm. many happy memories are made there!

wonderin' where i have been?

well, i am pregnant! yay!!! but i have been miserable, laying on the couch for a couple of months...not yay!! i think i am getting better now...so maybe i will return to the world of blogging. that was a maybe. i still feel a little (or a lot) lazy.