The other night Abbie came to me very excited saying, "the sky is purple mom!" So I ran with her to the window and sure enough the sky was purple.  What a wonderful sunset.

We had an unexpected guest at dinner last night.

Well he didn't actually eat dinner with us, but while we were eating dinner this owl landed in the tree in the backyard and we had to stop eating and watch him for a while.  It was really fun to sit and watch him looking for something to fly off and catch.  And that is just what he did.

The other morning I was sitting at the kitchen table working on something and looked up to see this group of wild turkeys walking through my yard.  By the time I found my camera they were into the neighbor's yard, (and as you can see from the nice sign on the tree they aren't very friendly either) so this was the best picture I could get.  Man these things looked mean, if I ran into them I would definitely run the other direction.  We saw them again later in our neighborhood so they must live somewhere close by.

Legos were the item of choice for Ashton's birthday.  Probably because we had recently made a trip to the Mall of America and made a lengthy stop in the Lego store there.  All the kids thought it was cool that they had so many things built out of Legos and I made them pose for a picture with Woody.

Happy Birthday Ashton!!  My little guy is SIX. That means lots of great things are happening at our house the most important being that he FINALLY gets to go to school.  He has waited "forever"(his words) to be able to go to kindergarten.  I guess that is how it feels when you have to wait an extra year to go to school because you barely miss the cut off date.  And all of your friends get to go and you don't.  He may hate it now, but will love it when he is 16.  I might not, we will have to see.

Ashton is such a great kid, he always tries to do the right thing.  He wants to be good and follow the rules.  I LOVE this kid so much.

Six things I love about Ashton:

1. He has a great imagination
2. He wants to do the right thing
3. He is sweet
4. He is the one to get us out and doing stuff as a family, he always wants to go somewhere
5. He makes sure that no one is being left out
6. He is a good example to me

(I saw this on a blog that I follow and I decided to do it  every year for my kids.)

The first day of school was even hard on Abbie and she didn't have to go...  She rarely takes naps anymore, and never during the afternoon.  If she is going to fall asleep it is going to be at the dinner table, or at 6:30 and sleep for an hour or something and then not be tired at bedtime.  But she crashed at 1:30.  It's probably because she was up at 6:30 with her sister.

Last Sunday we went for a drive along the Mississippi River.  It was absolutely amazing.  Beautiful.  We were lucky to catch the sunset on our way home.  This picture doesn't do justice to how beautiful it really was.  I live in a land so foreign to what I grew up with. I am so used to desert dry.  Beautiful in it's own way, but this place is different.  I never realized how dry it is in Utah until I came here.  But back to the river, our drive took about 2 hours and it was really fun.  I think the kids even enjoyed, at least they didn't complain about the drive so I think they liked it.   We are standing on the Wisconsin side of the river looking at the Minnesota shoreline.  We saw some eagles fishing in the river about the same time I took this picture but they were so far away that they just looked like dots on the water.  The kids really were excited about that.  There is a place were you can watch the eagles fish further down the river that we are going to have to go find sometime.