Time really does fly!!

What a crazily busy past few months this has been. (On a side note - I did get the drier working again.) I cannot believe the year is already coming to a close, in just under 2 months! It doesn't help either when the base exchange puts out all the Christmas decorations, lights and fake trees out on it's shelves extremely early. I mean, come on...I haven't even finished making the kids Halloween costumes and taken them out on their yearly candy raid. Let's not forget about Thanksgiving too!

Though, I admit that Christmas is my favorite time of the year! Really once Halloween has passed, I'm eager to savor the holiday season. The celebrating kind of starts for us around September though. J's and my anniversary is then. This year marked our 11th year. I framed some of his favorite pictures he took during our Beijing trip that he had printed out. J gave me an absolutely stunningly, gorgeous ring. I don't like gawdy things. I prefer simplicity. The ring has such a radiant simplicity and despite that I prefer not to attach much to material things, I do find myself still stopping on occasion to admire it; because of it's standalone beauty and for what it represents.

Moving onto October, one of my favorite months of the year. Is my birth month. :) I celebrated yet another year and have come to the conclusion that I'm loving the 30s. The 20s were an extremely trying decade. One that, despite the long hard road winding it's path, was much need for me to get to where I am today. I love being me!

Also in October, the older kids started Scouts. Autumn is a Daisy Scout and thoroughly enjoying it. Hunter is a 1st year Webelos Scout and working to earn his Webelos badge (about 1/2 way there!). I was a bit shocked with the sheer amount of homework that Hunter has to do for Webelos Scouts on top of his 4th grade assignments from school. So far he's managed to keep up very well in everything. He's also in the afterschool Academic Chess Club this term.

Halloween was last week. The kids had a blast with their costumes this year. Samantha dressed as Minnie Mouse, Autumn dressed in a Poodle Skirt outfit and Hunter dressed as Jack Sparrow. I made the costumes again this year (I've aldready begun thinking about next year). In addition to trick-or-treating, I took the kids to the school's family fun night and Hunter won for best movie character costume. :)

I am glad that Halloween is over now though. I am now working on planning Hunter's 10th birthdya party later this month (November), Thanksgiving at our place and creating this year's Christmas cards. Last year I adornded hand-made (by me) quilled snowflakes on hand-made cards for family. They were such a huge hit that I want to do some other creative theme this year.

Parent/teacher conferences are later this week. We now have 2 students attending the school. Thankfully the teachers has coordinated the conferences to be back-to-back and first thing in the morning on the first day of conferences no less. Seeing what the kids have been bringing home and the fact that I'm in regular contact with our children's teachers anyway, I expect the conferences to go very well.

Well, I have the usual housecleaning to get back to. The kids should be getting home from school soon and I still await a response from our house/unit owner (real landlord). I will have to elaborate later but the short version is the owner of the unit we are renting suspects double-dipping by the realty company (and possibly the property management company). We've done nothing wrong but this lease *saga* is I think far from over.