Brian and Devri: Our Own Eden: Dancin' through September

In September, stuff happened. Lots of stuff. Big stuff, little stuff, and everything in between. We started off the month wrapped up in new things for a new school year. One of the things we tried out was this gymnastics bus. Basically, there is this company that brings gymnastics to you in a bus that has been transformed into a gym. They had a free open house type thing where we could see if it was something that we wanted to do. Rachel and Gabe had lots of fun with it.

Unfortunately, they decided to have the bus come during the time that Rachel had preschool, so we didn't end up participating in it.

Lots of nights around here look a little something like this:

Rachel loves picking "flowers". We'd go for walks, and she'd want to stop so she could collect dandelions for me. A friend of mine mentioned how she loves when her boys bring her dandelions.
She said that they are her favorite flower, and that she has a tiny vase that she puts them in. I decided that I should get a tiny vase just for dandelions:

Bedtime hugs and kisses look like this:

We started getting ready for Halloween in September. I was really hoping to have our costumes all done by week one. Spoiler alert: it didn't happen. But, a friend of mine was dressing up as circus characters for Halloween, and her little girl, who is just a few months younger than Gabe, was going to be a little lion. I mentioned that I had this awesome headpiece for a lion that I had made for Gabe the year before and that I was sure it would fit her. I also made her some wristlets and anklets for her little girl. While we had that going on, there was a little playing around with the headpiece:

We tried out another thing for Rachel--a musical theater group for kids. We discovered last May that Rachel is a little performer, so we decided to give this a try. So far, she's been loving it.

Gabe is still a climber. We have to always make sure that we don't leave anything on the bar or he'll for sure find it. Case in point:

But, with a face like this, who can really stay mad at this little guy:

We went to church in September. I think four times.

And we had dinner at Nana and Papa's house at least once:

We slept. We woke up:

We went shopping for coats:

We decided to buy coats online.

Brian and Michael buried one more rain gutter pipe.

I think we only have one more pipe left to bury.

Rachel loved dressing up as a bride:

Gabe kept finding the light switch.

And served as my dress form for the lion anklets and wristlets I mentioned earlier.

There were hugs:

And Michael got glasses:

There were shenanigans:

More naps:

A few fits at church:

I think that I'm pretending to throw a fit to laugh at Gabe-- a trick I learned from my mom--but I can't guarantee that I didn't want to throw a real fit.

It must have been a rough day for him to snuggle up with the slate like this.

We had fun with cousins on a Sunday afternoon.

We read scriptures together almost every night. Thank heavens for the Gospel Library App!

Gabe loves to hug on Rachel. Back in September, she was his main person (other than Brian and I). He LOVES Rachel so much!

We had a our first parent/teacher conference and finally met Michael's teacher (since we missed back-to-school night and hadn't made it up there before this). Here's a project that Michael did.

We also decided to have permanent LED Christmas lights installed that blend into the house. It was a little pricey, but we're hoping it saves us on power and Saturdays in the future. They can be changed to any color, so we've had a lot of fun lighting up our house for various occasions. Over the next few months, Brian also figured out how to integrate them with our home automation stuff. He's slowly turning our home into a smart home.

Sometimes, when you turn on your phone to take a picture of something, it's on selfie mode. Usually, I just want to hurry and switch it before anyone sees what I'm looking at, but this particular time, I thought, "Huh, not to bad. I think it's a good time to take a selfie."