Another Soccer Season

Maya played another season of soccer on her Pink Lion Cubs team.  She really had a blast - even on the windy, rainy days.  I'm not sure if it was maturity or a slight change in girls but this team was really focused and seemed to gain skills by leaps and bounds this year.  They started to pull together as a team and worked on some actual strategy.  Maya gained a lot of confidence and really went after that ball!  She is already counting down until spring soccer begins.

The team - minus one.

Some action shots - Maya is wearing the green shoes.

And earning her first trophy, she was SO excited for this!

Most of the team and Coach Andrew.

Halloween

The girls each had many Halloween parties to attend this year which gave them the perfect opportunity to show off their costumes.  Laurel was a Cheetah (NOT a jaguar or leopard) and Maya was a racoon.  We had a costume party for girl scouts, school, my work and then trick or treating on Halloween night.  And despite the complete downpour on Halloween night the kids still managed to have fun walking around the neighborhood.

It is all about the pumpkins

We spent quite a bit of time visiting, picking out, decorating and carving our pumpkins.  The girls (and, well, me) really look forward to this time of the year... the start of fall and all that comes with it.

Laurel's class took a field trip to the pumpkin patch and I was lucky enough to charperone.  This is the only picture I managed to take, but she sure had a blast.  Animals, hay mazes, pumpkins and a train ride, what more could 15 4 year olds ask for?!?!

We managed to squeeze in a quick family trip to a new pumpkin patch this year.  It was hard to fit it in with all the rain but we were able to get in a couple hours.  We had a special guest with us this year, Callie got to join while Aunt Jenny was sick.  

Cousins!

We ventured through one of the corn mazes - the girls wanted to do both but by the time we finished the first the rain was coming down pretty hard so we opted to skip it.  These three fearless leaders led us all the way through and we made it out the other side!  

The lines were WAY too long for us to actually wait in to purchase pumpkins at this place, but we did take some pictures.  Then drove to the local fruit stand next to our house to pick out our pumpkins there :-)

But we made sure to take plenty of pictures with every type of pumpkin possible before leaving!

And of course we carved them.  Each girl picked out the perfect pumpkin and then picked out the perfect design.

Laurel dug right in and cleaned out the whole thing by herself - mostly because she was teamed up with me and I made her :-)

Maya, on the other hand, scooped out about one spoonful and refused to touch the guts with her hands.  She was able to convince Daddy to do it for her!

The final products!

3/4 of the family!