Corn maze & pumpkin patch

So it turned out the corn maze didn't open until noon (we got there at 10:30ish), and all the pumpkins froze overnight & turned to mush, but it was still a good time.  And an excellent day to take pictures.

B built this fort with the help of some other kids:

Children of the corn?

Too cool to smile for a photo:

Until his dad says "poop."

Where's B?

She's part monkey:

But always glamorous:

A couple parting shots that I just couldn't pass up -- a storm moving in over the Rockies, and a perfect rural farm scene.

Wherein the kids earn their keep

Then B got naughty:

In that one on the far-right, he's got a rubber band aimed at me & my camera. Sassy pants.  Speaking of sass, here is the Queen of Sass looking unbearably cute and innocent:

And yes, that's a for sale sign in the background. Our house went on the market yesterday. Nervous.  It's a long story that maybe I'll tell on another day.

Z does her own hair

Z got in a little trouble today and got sent to her room for awhile.  After she finished her hissy fit (note the pink & puffy eyes -- it was a doozy), it got veeeeeeerrrrrrry quiet in there.  When she came out, she had done her own hair.  She wore it like this all morning, and everyone at C0stco thought it was bootiful.

Happy birthday to the twinnadoes

My sister and her family were here to visit in early August.  I only got to see them once, thanks to my wackadoo travel schedule.  The twins turned one shortly after they left, so my mom seized the opportunity to throw a party. Here's my sister with one of the two cute patooties -- I think this one is S, but I can't say for sure (REALLY identical twins):

That one must be A if the one in the yellow baby speedo is S.  Or I could be totally wrong.  Apparently she doesn't feed them enough, because one tried to eat my lens cap and the pool toys:

But his dad distracted him with a Mike's (What?!  You're not supposed to give that to babies?  But it makes them sleepy!)

One more extremely cute baby picture before we move on to pictures of my own babies:

Sadly, you won't see any pictures of B in this post.  He doesn't much like having his picture taken anymore, and besides, he had a kajillion cousins to play with at this party, so the best I could've done would have been a B-tinted blur anyway.  Here's my bathing beauty Z:

Who can also be quite the ham:

She occasionally holds still for a picture:

But most of the time you have to put the camera in multiple-shot mode and hope for the best:

Beautiful

Check out B's new haircut -- yep, I finally convinced him to get it cut. I told him it was either that or let me wash & comb it more often. He went with the haircut to avoid that!

And an evening wagon ride around the neighborhood is a great thing to do on a spring day! It's certainly better than staying cooped up in the house with tired kids.

A trip down memory lane

I'm not only a bad blogger, I'm a bad parent.  I have hardly taken any pictures over the past several months.  What I really need is a picture of B since we made him get his hair cut.  Well, we didn't really make him.  We just told him that he'd have to brush & wash it more often if he was going to keep it long.  He was in the barber's chair in the blink of an eye.

So these are pictures taken last September that never made it onto the blog.  Hiker B looks SO young in these pictures!  It's amazing how much he's grown up in just five months.  Kindergarten will do that to you, or so I hear.  Both of these were taken on our Backyard Mountain.

Then there's the ever-popular Z-pounds-a-beer shot.  Ever since he totally freaked me out by sending Z in to chug water out of a beer bottle in front of me, M has thought it's hilarious to let her "drink beer."

Peek-a-boo!

Oldies but goodies

Taken on January 10, and left to languish on the computer without a bloggy home:

Another day, another playground

Z at school

Yeah yeah, I know. Bad blogger. Christmas was busy, and my job has exploded this month. I've got oodles of pictures piled up that I'll try to get edited & posted one of these days. In the meantime, here are some pictures of Z in action at school:

Can you see the band-aid on her forehead in the one above?  She threw herself to the floor in the midst of a hissy fit and hit her head on a door hinge, leaving a large gouge in her forehead.  They called me to come get her, and the pediatrician glued it back together for her.

 
Note the stylin' new specs in this last photo.  We got them a couple of weeks ago, and this time it's going much better than it did when we tried a year and a half ago.  She kept taking them off and breaking them then, making them more of a liability than anything.  This time we got some that are supposed to be unbreakable.  They're also very flexible, so I imagine they're more comfy for her.  She's doing a great job of keeping them on.

Z at the beach

She's less sure of the water than B.  I remember him being afraid of the waves when he was little too, so I bet she'll love it when she's bigger too.