I just can't believe that in less than 2 weeks, Thanksgiving is here.

And in 17 days, Jake turns 12!! One more year and I will have 2 teens in the house. *sigh* He is having his party on the 24th this year. We used to always tease him that he could be our Thanksgiving turkey cause he was a little butterball. :D

The leaves are falling like crazy, but the kids are mad. They didn't change colors yet (they have up on the mountain though). And now it is cold and we are expecting rain. So they're not sure if they'll be able to go out and play in them. (They usually have a HUGE pile!) Maybe this week will be decent. We'll see. If it is, I'll have some pictures. My kids are never worried about "being too old" to play in the leaves. ;)

Here are some pics of the kids from Halloween night. They are dressed as characters from Resident Evil 4.

Here are the kids' Jack-o-Lanterns -

I really need to get into the habit of posting more often. :)

What's going on with the family.. Well dh is back to physical therapy for his knee. 3 times a week for a month. Not sure what the dr. wants to do after that month of PT is up. I think dh goes back to him on the 5th. Apparently he was hollered at yesterday for doing to much. He's been doing a lot around the house, cleaning up work from various projects, blocks from our 'flood wall', and then we were helping FIL split & stack wood on the front porch. So he's been pretty sore this week.

My brother is doing ok after his surgery. he was in surgery for longer than they though, and he didn't wake up for about 2 hours afterwards. He went to his follow-up appt. on Wed. so I went with him. The dr. said the incision looked good, it wasn't infected like I thought. They had to remove some lymph nodes also, as they had cancer in them as well. We didn't know that. He was on a low dose of thyroid medicine, but had to stop that. He has an appt with the oncologist about his radiation treatment. Not sure when they'll schedule that.

The kids and I doing fine. Been busy doing work around the house, so not much school being done. LOL it always happens this way when we attempt to start back. I think we should wait until Ocotober to start next year. ;)

Tomorrow is actually her birthday. But she had a party 2 weeks ago with her friends. The past few years the weather has been crappy and it was always raining or threatening to. So she decided this year would have to be earlier. She had the girls over, and they swam, ate pizza, cake & ice cream. Hung out and chatted, swam some more. Then when it was dark we made a fire and they ate s'mores.

So for her birthday meal she wanted to go to Panera Bread. We were planning to go tomorrow, but Jake is having some company over. So off we went today. The food was good. Amanda and I both got the new panini's - Chicken Pomodoro, Jake got the Frontega Chicken panini (he has this new addiction to onions LOL), and Dh got the Smokehouse Turkey panini. Then after we ate, we all picked something from the bakery to bring home.

We had gone to Border's first. Dh stocked up on more magazines for next week (surgery on the 28th). Amanda got a game guide, and Jake got a mag and manga.

That's been our day. I am so stuffed right now. (I had to eat my dessert already. It was an apple pastry. It was just calling out my name. I couldn't resist.)

We use our fireplace area as a sort of catch-all for everything. (Kind of like the dining roo table is for most people, us included.. if we had a dining room table. LOL) So yesterday I pulled everything off and attempted to sort if out. Well Jake has a TON of gae magazines. So I made piles, each magazines, put them in order for oldest to newest. And I made him go through these. He rarely reads them. Most of them were free subscriptions, so no worries about wasted money. He went through a decent stack, enough to fill a shoe box. He has about that much more to do yet. So that is his job this morning when he gets up, because I want to take the recycling away today.

So about the only thing left is the basket we use to hold all the game controlers, beach towels, and a box of Usborne books I have for sale. LOL

Today I really, really need to get started on the kids old school stuff. I wanted to do this once the yard sale was over, earlier this week.. but never got to it. So I think I'll drag that out today. I need to clean out the old, old stuff, so I can remove last years things out of the house.

Then I want/need a new larger book shelf. In the upstairs hall and I have a small book shelf, and a small pantry cabinet with doors. But I want a nice large book shelf, and I will take the smaller one out. I a hoping to get most of the games into the one with doors, as they are kind of everywhere. So I am planning to get one next week.

After that, I will be reorganzing the books so I can have room on the downstairs shelves to store all the books for 2007-08 school year.