Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was great in our family. We were able to spend Sunday night with my brother's family, my Mom and my Aunt at my Mom's new condo. I'm so grateful that the move is mostly behind her now for her sake. I know that it's harder than I can comprehend to move from a place you've lived in for so long. Here's a picture taken at her condo of the Utah grandkids.


I'm glad that I was able to take the day off of work and spend the whole day with Matthew the day before Thanksgiving. Dave's parents were really nice and watched Allison for me so I could take Matthew to an eye appointment with a specialist and volunteer at his school without having to worry about her too. Matthew has one eye that is pretty much blind and he does need glasses, but there is no disease in his bad eye, which is definitely something to be grateful for. Matthew had a fun feast at school on Wednesday that I was able to help with and they all made cute costumes to wear. They all sat in a circle and told their teacher things that they were grateful for. It turns out, the things that they are grateful for are the same things that I'm grateful for: Family, friends, our country, a warm house, Jesus, a healthy body, and toys.

Matthew's class:
Matthew in his indian costume:

Thanksgiving morning I woke up early and went with some friends from my neighborhood and did a 5K. No, I didn't run...walked the whole thing, but it was really fun and helped me justify all the yummy Thanksgiving food. :) Dave's family was mostly out of town this year and my Mom went up to Bear Lake so we ended up going out to eat with Dave's parents and my brother & SIL. We then went up to their house for a little while.

I bought Allison a hat a few months ago and she FINALLY agreed to wear it on Thanksgiving. She also actually let me take a quick portrait of her in our garage right before we left for our Thanksgiving lunch. It was pretty tricky not to get the cars in her background, but it worked and she smiled!
I hope that you all have had a great Thanksgiving weekend (despite the crappy ending to the Utah/BYU game). I still say 'Go Utes!'

Halloween

I'm not much of a fan of Halloween for adults, but I love it for kids. Our kids had so much fun this year with a few Halloween parties and trick-or-treating. Matthew was in the parade at his school; I video taped it and was going to post it on this, but I still haven't downloaded it. I figured I better post Halloween without it since it's almost Thanksgiving. :)

Our street gets NO trick-or-treaters for Halloween. We know because we left full size candy bars on our doorstep this Halloween and they were all there when we got home. We went trick-or-treating with some neighborhood friends on their street and Allison was trying really hard to keep up with the bigger kids. She was running the whole time saying, 'Wait for me Emily!'. Emily is 8 and Allison adores her. Emily was really sweet and waited with her and when Emily was done, Allison was ready for more. Dave took her down another whole long street and she was still going strong. I think she could have done it all night. Matthew on the other hand was WAY too tired to keep going, even for candy.

September Low Down

Here's the skinny on all the happenings in the Locher Fam in September, since now we're almost done with October! September was a busy and fun month. We started it off by heading down to Marysvale again over Labor Day. We went 4 wheeling and hung out with Dave's family. Dave's Dad was able to go for a short ride, something that we thought he'd never be able to do a few years ago.

Allie lovin' it:
Matthew, Papa and Uncle Jason:
We saw animals in about every way possible in September with our little fam. The zoo has the best baby animals right now. A baby elephant, 3 baby tigers, a baby snow leopard, and a baby giraffe. You must go see if you're in Utah!

Not the baby giraffe, but I had a lot of fun taking pictures of this giraffe and the backlighting:

The baby elephant was SO cute. He got to see him run (that was my favorite part):

And animals at the state fair. It was rainy the night we went, but it kept the crowds down and Allison had fun jumping in the puddles. Matthew just loved having our umbrellas out; he digs umbrellas.


Cute baby pigs:Not every day that you get to see a grizzly ride a scooter:

Ah, puddle jumping!
And animals at the circus. I think the circus was a one time deal for us, but I'm glad we did it.
In September we also went down and saw all the flags that Sandy puts out in memory of those who died on 9/11.
Oh, and I took Matthew down to some school buses that park near our house and got some pictures of the big kindergarten kid. Here's my favorite:

ALASKA!!

We went to Alaska in August and loved it. Granted, the kids probably would have been just as happy at a place with a swimming pool and a pet store, but I'm glad we did it. We went on a cruise ship from Vancouver Canada to Whittier Alaska and then spent a couple of days in Anchorage. Brace yourself for a lot of pictures. It was really hard to narrow down to these from around 700 or more pictures!

Sail away from Vancouver
Allison caught red handed pulling the knobs off of our light in our cabin. I told the steward the first night not to bother putting them back on until after we were off of the ship. Notice the chocolate ring around her mouth. Yummy, yummy ice cream on the ship.
Our days at sea were spent mostly swimming, relaxing, and of course... eating. :) The kids had a lot of fun in the water. Matthew is luckily getting more comfortable in the water and loves to be in it as long as he's near the edge. Allison has no fear and didn't want us to help her swim.
Our first stop was in Ketchikan. Dave's parents were with us and were kind enough to watch the kids for us. We had scheduled a bear watching tour, but they made a mistake and had us booked for a tour of Misty Fjords. They tried to make our schedules match up, but it didn't work, so they offered to take us on both tours. The Misty Fjords were beautiful, but I was worried most of the time that Dave was going to get motion sick like he did on a helicopter flight we went on in Maui. He luckily survived, but I think he'd be fine if he never goes on a sea plane again.
The bear watching tour was my favorite part of our whole trip. We took a short sea plane ride to Traitors Cove to see bears in the wild. Our bear guide gave us an odd sense of security. We saw several different bears near the rivers and one bear was just slightly below us and probably within 20 feet of where we were standing. I surprisingly wasn't freaked out ...completely weird to think about now.

Next day we stopped in Juneau. We went to Mendenhall glacier and basically just hung out around there. They also had a creek with some salmon and we were able to see a couple of bears and the kids saw them with us. Dave stayed with the kids and I walked down to the waterfall by the glacier.Skagway was our next stop. We just walked around the shops, looked at the trains, and played at the playground.Matthew's Birthday! He turned 5 while we were gone. That day was spent at Glacier Bay. We went swimming and watched glaciers all day and the weather was perfect. It was fun.
More glaciers the next day. We went to college fjord. This time we saw lots of black specks on the floating ice and they were sea lions.The cruise was over, but we spent the day we got off of the ship and the following day in Anchorage. The Alaska Conservation Center was cool. We saw moose, baby moose, buffalo, bears, eagles, etc. The trainer was there when we saw the grizzly bear and he did a few tricks for her.Matthew got to feed a reindeer at the Wild Berry Products store. He thought that was pretty cool. We went and saw an Iditarod show and got to hold the little puppies. They were so stinkin' cute.
OK, just a couple more pictures. There were a ton of really pretty flowers there. Could have spent a lot of time just taking pictures of them and driven the family crazy, but I settled for just a couple. :)
We watched the sunset before we went to the airport and it was a great way to end our trip.

The day we've prepared for...

So, it feels like we've been preparing Matthew for kindergarten for a long time and yet it came all too soon. His first day went great. He got on the bus fine (something we'd wondered if he would do a couple of years ago). It definitely helped that one of his good friends meets the bus at the same bus stop. They were both excited to go and I was more composed than I thought I would be. My nerves kicked in after he got on when I realized that I hadn't coached Matthew about the trip home and what bus stop to get off. Needless to say, I was very relieved when I saw him get off the bus the first day.

Newborns--too precious

As many of you know, I love taking pictures. My favorite is taking capturing newborns in their first couple of weeks. They are so precious. I've been blessed to have a few friends let me take pictures of their newborns for them, but I always forget to ask if I can show off some of the pictures on my blog. I remembered to ask this time! Isn't she sweet? I love all of her hair. She's just 8 days old.

Has it really been 5 years?

Matthew turned 5 while on our trip to Alaska. He's getting so grown up on us. Doesn't he even look older in this picture? Maybe it's because he was all dressed up for dinner. Happy Birthday Matthew! He especially thought he was cool because he got a birthday card from the captain.