Lovelihood

Gonna try and keep it managable with this year's costumes. Although, with the weather turning, it's been tempting to spend every free moment under that quilt that I'm still hand-stitching while instantly queuing episodes of Lost that, yes, I'm just now getting around to buying into. In the spirit of keeping it quick and simple, I've picked through my stash for appropriate-enough materials. And my once beloved wool cardigan, now at the end of its off-the-rack life, will be prodded and tweaked into something slightly more ursine.

In Kindergarten doing your word search homework in purple marker is perfectly acceptible. It is also, evidently, exciting enough to elicit a "This is so exciting I'm going to write an exclamation mark!". True story.

An up-the-nose shot of this month's calendar page, as interpretted by The Boy in construction paper mosaic.

In Houston we learned that carving your pumpkin more than one day in advance of the big day would leave it vulnerable to the humidity and critters, which even in October could be a reckoning force. Evidently our Seattle squirrels, emboldened and fortified by their stolen birdfeeder loot have taken a cue from their Southern brethren and started in on our early pumpkin haul, harvested from the garden at The Boy's school.

I've been slacking on updating the emergency kit to be kept at Bear's school for, you know, emergencies. The last piece, to be included in the two gallon baggie along with freeze-dried fruit and spare underwear, are the list of contacts and current photos. I, of course, laminate these, because that's the kind of parent I am.

Among my birthday loot was an upside-down planter, because, as The Mr. put it, it'd been a while since I found a new way to kill a plant. It's funny because it's true. This little plant is resigned to its sad fate, but it's still pretty cute hanging there above the sink.

The amount of time that our children actually fit a pair of shoes seems so torturously small. We buy the Keens too big and keep their feet in them probably too long, so that there's always at least two shoe sizes between consecutive pairs. Bear never complains, though, that (before) her toes were pinched or that (now) her gait has a definite clownish quality to it. She loves her new pair, galloping along (even clip-clopping her tongue while she does it) at a faster clip than normal when walking up to her brother's school. www.lovelihood.com