It's been a while...

I haven't posted anything for a while.  Why?  No good reason.  Just busy and tired.  Plus, now that we're in the swing of school, we're kinda in a routine and it's hard to get away from that.  By the time the kids are in bed for the night, the kitchen is cleaned up, Hannah's lunch is made for the next school day, dinner is prepped for the next day, the laundry is put away/put in washer/folded I'm tired!  It's all I can do to yank the contacts out of my eyes and brush my teeth before falling into bed.  But I love it.  Why?  Because I'm insane.

Nothing too exciting has been going on lately.  Normal "fall" stuff.  We bought a season pass to an apple orchard not far from here.  It was awesome.  At first I thought...apple orchard?  Season pass?  Really?  But the orchard is a small part of the farm.  They have lots of animals to view, a corn pool, giant jumping pillow, lots of little fun things for the kids to do.  I took the kids every Monday after school.  They had such a great time.  Of course, Noah would come home with a diaper full of corn, but oh well.  He washes well.  I'm bummed that it's now closed for the season.  Next year we're definitely doing it again.  The kids got worn out and I got to chit chat with my bestie, Laura.  Win/win!

I have discovered the Ankeny dog park.  It's not like it hasn't been there before now but I just never had a need to go there.  Bella LOVES it.  As soon as I pull into the parking lot she's up to the window whining to get out.  I have to wrestle her to stay on the leash until we get through the gate.  Then she's off!  I have never seen that dog run so fast!  She is built for speed so away she goes.  If there are other dogs there (which there typically is), she'll find ones that like to run too and they chase each other.  I'm amazed at the energy in that dog.  She'll run for 45 minutes straight until I tell her we need to go.  Then she trots back to the car before passing out in the backseat.  Once we get home, she's usually curled up in her bed for the rest of the day.

I'm thinking of finding a dog park for kids.  Noah needs somewhere to run off this energy.  Man, it'd be nice if he could run around for a few hours then come home and sleep.

When I get around to uploading pictures from the past few months, I'll post a few.  We've done a lot of 'family' type things this fall.  Lots of fall fun.  Sometimes the fun looks better on paper than in reality, but at least we were together as a family.  Joel and I may have wanted to strangle the kids by the time we left, but at least we had togetherness.

And isn't that the most important thing?  :)