Picture Day Has Cometh.

I'm behind on posting pictures.

 We've gone to the zoo with friends.

The Boy learned how to ride a bike (well, with training wheels at least).

We took a trip to the Legoland in Kansas City.

We took a trip to see Grandad and went fishing at his pond.

We saw a kangaroo hopping around free and unfenced at the zoo.

We saw some baby pigs at the Pumpkin Patch.

And a baby cow..

 Here the two look innocent sit nicely with their friend. 

 Then, the Boy tries to eat the Girl's brains. 

 I don't even know what they're doing here.

Here, the girls sleep and the Boy becomes possessed. 

But best of all, we saw our friend at the Pumpkin Patch!

Since posing for picture clearly went so well, we took them to get lost in the corn maize! 

Which leads us to:

HALLOWEEN!

Wheew!


And that catches most of the way back up!

Guess Who's Gonna Be 8?!??!

This Girl!

We couldn't ask for a smarter, more creative, more energetic kid. And occasionally, I even catch her like she is in this picture, with an actual smile!

The Zoo Says *Hello*

It's been a while since a full pictorial of the zoo has been given. I figured it was about time to give an updated *Hello* from the full Family Zoo..

This is Bear. He's about 9 months old now. He's learning his signs very well. It took us long enough to figure out he was deaf. Smarter than the rest of them really though.

This is Merlin a.k.a. or Grandpa Hissypants. He's the oldest of the bunch.

Domino. He's the more shy of the 2 bunnies. 

Thumper. He's more adventuresome. 

I think we all know which crazy animal this is! 

Thumper and Domino together.

The ever elusive Toby. He rarely comes out when people are over. 

Ulee, also our people flee-er. He likes to eat plastic. 

 

Fuzzy, aka Jinx, is the fluffiest of the bunch. He also lets the kids get away with allllmost anything. 

The Frog Tank. It has umm.. somewhere between 12 and 16 frogs in it. We also have an experiment of fruit flies going on to feed this little herd of frogs. 

Squirtle. That cat, as you can see, is the Boy's own personal toy.

Dance fever boy!

Toby and Vinny. Vinny is our only female cat. And of course has the most male name. Go figure. 

Squirtle wearing a harness. 

And last, but never least, Killer the Crazy Beagle. Ok. His name is really Timmy. But he keeps catching things outside and bringing them to me as "treats". He's only in his crate because he wiggles too much to catch a picture of. His entire body shakes with happiness like he has some kind of seizure disorder. He's crazy I say. Crazy.

The Puppy!

We've been working with the puppy quite a bit, you know.. Training them. Like you're supposed to. And we've discovered that our puppy (the 60 pound Great Pyrenees) is mostly deaf. Which is a relief that he's not being just THAT stubborn, but at the same time D'oh! He's actually taking to the slight variation in training (using more hand signals, trying to use a flashlight, guiding him with out hand, etc) fairly well. Mostly, he's just a good puppy with a lazy personality that likes hot dogs. We're gonna just roll with that for a while.

 Several people have suggested the great need to go to the vet and see exactly what he can or can't hear (well, he doesn't turn his head to his name or middle range sounds.. at all.. It's good enough for me.) and several have suggested it's *my* fault he's lazy and stubborn about coming when called. Which I would agree with IF he wouldn't come bounding when he could see me and when I did the hand motion for Come. But he does, which only supports the deaf and not the stubborn lazy. If he was a high energy, naughty, misbehaving dog - I might see these as potential issues. But he's not. He lopes. He lazes.

He loves to rest on the sofa too. The girl is holding on to him because otherwise he falls off like a limp, overcooked noodle.

Fall!

Fall may have started to move in and break the 105 weather we've been having for the last several months. It's rainy, cool, and downright fallish today. At 55 degrees this morning, it feels outright chilly even. The dogs are soggy wet for the first time in a while and hate it too. (Which I find hilarious..)

Sick Boy

We've been trying to change the wee boy's migraine medication since his Keppra started to not work consistently. They put him on something we've not tried before and while it *seems* to have stopped the migraines it's caused this:

Barf bowl carrying. He has just finished the taper, so the hope is that it will stop. But it hasn't yet. I've called the pediatrician and the neurologist. They've had the same idea that it *should* stop, so we're waiting yark bucket in hand. I guess that's one benefit to homeschooling, he can be yarky and still get his stuff done. You aren't supposed to send a barf-a-tastic kid to "real" school though.

School Pictures!

Since we homeschool, the only real thing *I* actually miss is school pictures. So we made up our own this year. I stapled up a plain, solid colored background, got the 2 all dressed up in their nicer clothes (well, clean at least) and we just went to town taking pictures together!

This is what we ended up with!

And this one just HAD to be taken of a kitty cuddle!

The kids have grand plans about some other outfits and a park where we should take some more pictures, so hopefully we'll be able to get that done pretty soon. Overall I'm really pretty pleased with how these came out! It worked out better than I thought it might have. Certainly not any worse than the 1 shot at real school photos!