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I found this new blog carnival on Raising Explorers. If you have photos to post that your kids have taken check it out. Autumn started using a camera given to her by her grandfather about 6 months ago. It was interesting to see what she thought was beautiful and important. It was also interesting to see everything in our home from such a little perspective. One of her favorite things to do is build Lego towers with Brian. Last night she cleaned up for over an hour just so she could build a tower. These are pictures she has taken of some of their Lego creations.  In the last two pictures she meant to take a picture of her foot with the Lego trains.

Brian took this on his Palm and it makes me laugh. For more wordless Wednesday pics go here.

I closed the store last night and Ashley waited up for me.  So it was that we were talking at 1am when Hunter walked out into the livingroom in a sleepy daze - but not without his ever-present mischievous grin.  He said he wanted some water and proceeded into the kitchen.  After a minute went by with no noise coming from the kitchen I went in to find him lying on the floor next to his still empty water cup.  Even then, too tired to fill his cup with water, he managed to act very boyish when I got out the camera.

Today is the first day of my favorite season.  The children and I are going to celebrate by doing leaf rubbings from leaves we find at the park.  They will be working on a leaf collector book that I found from our favorite printable’s website.  We are also going on an acorn hunt because acorn starts with “A” and we have started our alphabet lessons again.  I’m starting with “A” again.  Hopefully this year we will make it through the whole alphabet.  How will you be celebrating this wonderful season?

We are still in the midst of home preschool.   One thing I am trying to teach is the art of correspondence.  We often mail things to relatives or friends.  I was so impressed with this recent letter that I thought I would post it to share.  Autumn told me what she wanted to write and I wrote the words for her to copy.  Her penmanship is really improving.  Can you tell what it says?

Here are the 168 best pictures of our annual trip to Birch Bay.  Warning: it will take you 8.4 minutes to watch the whole thing.   You may want to get some popcorn first.

Last night around 11:00PM we made it home from our 12 day vacation to Washington for my brother’s wedding.  After Brian and I sort through the pictures we will post a slide show.  For now I’ll just post two from the wedding:

A great treat to have while your kids are sleeping and you are sitting on the couch reading the third Harry Potter book.

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On the 4th of July we celebrated our fifth anniversary.  In some ways it seems like the time has really flown by (have I really been having this much fun for 5 years now?) and in other ways the time seems appropriately long (we do have 3 kids).  One area that has really shown the wear and tear of our five years are our wedding gifts.  Our very nice, expensive towels are now quite pathetic and have a permanent odor to them, our great set of Rubbermaid storage containers are lost, stained, or have broken lids, and our expensive non-stick Teflon pan set is quite a bit “stickier” than it used to be.  I guess these things are not meant to last more than 5 years, but we don’t have the money to replace all of them now.  Therefore I propose a new tradition that everyone should give quinquennialweds replacement gifts.  If everyone gave their friends the exact same thing they gave them for the wedding on their 5th anniversary no one would have to go to bed under stained sheets or a  quilt with 3 holes burned through it.

For those of you who didn’t know us 5 years ago here are a few pictures from the blessed event and  from our subsequent anniversaries: