Correction

I don't know why I'm always having to do this, but here's another correction. Dave says I've been stuffing my face with chocolate. Well, I think he likes to substitute my name with his when he's doing something he's not proud of. The Halloween candy IS a real problem this year. We're used to getting mostly suckers and smarties, but with the more wealthy areas here in Oregon, chocolate is the favorite treat to distribute on Halloween night. We brought home 3 HUGE bags of it, and I'm proud to say, I've only had 3 mini candy bars, total. My 4 boys, on the other hand, have depleted the supply by nearly half already. Stew has been a big part of that half. We've been working on potty training, and candy is a great motivator for him...
AHHHH... Potty training. I live in fear of the time when my kids reach about 2.5 years old. I don't know why, because both Braden and Chris were really easy to train. Braden had it down in about a day and a half, and Chris took less than six hours. It's TRUE, I promise. He was about 2 years and 8 months old and one morning I decided I'd had enough of Dave's complaining about changing diapers, so I showed Chris how to use the potty, and half an hour later I sat him down to 'practice' and left him there while I answered the phone. About one minute into my conversation, I heard a cry of elation/surprise come from the bathroom. Ever since, Chris has been using the big boy potty without any urging from me. He even gave up nighttime diapers that same day (Braden was totally out of diapers, even at night by about 2 yrs, 8mos as well). I guess the fear and trepidation I always felt before potty training was all for this particular time in my life. Stew has not taken to the whole potty thing quite as readily as the others. He just had his third birthday, and shows no sign of caring about that big, squishy thing stuck to his behind. Do they let kids go to primary if they're still in diapers????
In Dave's last post, he left many of you, our devoted readers, to wonder what the heck is going on with us. I admit, he kind of made it sound like he just didn't want his job here. Well, that wasn't exactly what happened. His company had to shut down, so everyone at his office, the California office and the Korea office are now unemployed. We're thankful it happened when it did, because we were just about ready to buy a house here. I don't really want to try and sell another home in this market:). Dave has had some good job prospects, and we hope to get one in particular that is located in Salt Lake. Our lease here is up as of the 10th, so we are going to move down to Gunnison, UT with Dave's parents until we figure out the whole job thing. We leave a week from today. Off on another adventure!

We're going to miss it

Well, it's been a good 12 months here. Too bad it all has to come to an end. Things aren't going to work out with work here in Portland and we're going to move - again. The plan is to move now even though we don't have the final destination decided on, but we're excited to be making the change. We've had a great time here and it's going to be tough to leave. We've met a lot of great people and have had a lot of fun in the outdoors around here. There's so much more we were planning on doing, but figured we had more time to do it.

Ellie turned 1 on the 13th and Stew turned 3 on the 24th. Those were fun days. We just quickly threw the parties together and had a great time. Stew was especially excited even though we told him he wasn't 'big' unless he quit utilizing his diapers. All the talk about not being big enough at Disney World for the rides made that a very sensitive topic for him.



Halloween was a success. We took the kids out to a more upscale neighborhood for the trick-or-treating. Turns out that is a double-edged sword. Tiff has been stuffing her face with chocolate for the last 3 days. Stew was the funniest - running from house to house in his bug costume, yelling "Happy Haaaoooooeeeeennn!" at every door.



The weather has been great for the last few weeks which has been fun since normally we don't get outside much in the fall. Plus we wanted to get out and take some more pictures of our favorite places since we're going to be moving soon.



They even have a giant pumpkin boat race here in town which was quite the site. Huge pumpkins hollowed out and people just register to paddle them around a community lake. It looked really difficult to try to get those melons moving in the right direction.



We made it to the coast a week ago and it was great. 70 degrees with a slight breeze. The forecast called for big waves, so we figured it was a great time to head out there. It was a lot of fun.




We've had quite the adventure here in Portland and are glad we had the chance to move out here for the last year. We're excited to hopefully be moving back closer to family though. I would love to live here, but it's hard to justify when we have the choice of where to live and the kids need to know their extended family. I expect that should we move back we will have warn out our welcome within 7 months.