Funny girl

Miriam is at that grand age when she can communicate so much with so few sounds at her disposal (she is, after all, not even 20 months old). Here are some current family favorites:

• Whenever she sees Mickey Mouse--on her diapers, on the TV, on a book--she makes her piggy noise. Yes, my child mistakes a rodent for a porker.
• Her "I'm finished" signal when she's eating meals is "Ah mama," meaning "All done please, Mama." A while ago when I was out and Seth was on meal duty, he asked Miri if she was all done. Her response: "Ah mama ... dada."
• Miriam is wild about pumpkins. For the entire month of October and carrying on to November, she gets über excited every time she sees one of the gourds and exclaims, "Wah-co! Wah-co!" She even mistook Buddy's doghouse (Buddy is Grandpa Dennis' golden lab) for a jack-o-lantern. (Because it was dark outside and Buddy's orange heat lamp was on inside the doghouse.)
• Lately Miri gets very upset when she's missing someone in the family. After dropping Ana off at preschool yesterday, we drove home and unloaded from the van. As I shut the door to the garage, Miri realized that she was minus a sister and shouted,"ANAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
• Miriam calls her pacifier a "baba" because that's what we've called such cry-halting devices since Bekah coined the term in her babyhood. But Miri has added a new term to our lovey vocabulary: "uh-oh." That's how she refers to her blanky.

Yes, folks ... she IS a doll.

Costumes and trick-or-treating

From the time my kids have been big enough to talk, I've let them choose their Halloween costumes. Usually, their choices fit within a certain theme. (Although, not always, unless you could say the theme was "animals" that year.)

This year, we threw themes out the window. Bekah wanted to be Princess Leia. Ana wanted to be ... wait for it ... a walrus. Miri got to reuse the cow costume (which is reversible) to be a horse (since she always neighs VERY enthusiastically whenever she sees a horse).

The three hooligans on our porch before the neighborhood trick-or-treating.

As always, we trick-or-treated at all the Idaho Falls' grandparents' houses. First we visited Grandpa Wirkus.

Grandpa insisted they each take five pieces of candy. When Miri only got two, Grandpa had to put three more in the sack I held. "But Grandpa," I said, "she can't even count."

Grandpa Scott was helping Grandpa Wirkus put a new doorknob on his shop. While Bekah teased Miri through the screen door, Grandpa Scott sneaked up behind her.

Then we stopped at my parents' house.

Grandma was on the phone when we arrived.

While we stopped at home to eat a quick dinner and pick up Seth, Grandma Susan and Grandpa Dennis came over to borrow our computer to Skype with Cooper the Cowboy in Virginia. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures because I was busy warming up lasagna and making some last-minute flipper feet for Ana.

After throwing our dishes in the sink, we drove to Old Grandma's house to show off costumes and pick up some treats.

I told the girls we should have brought an eye patch for Old Grandma since she already had a parrot on her shoulder.

To see more Halloween photos, click here.

Ghoulish gourds

In case you've been living in a hole (or you just don't read our blog regularly ... but that's about the same, right?), you know that we have a thing for pumpkin carving. We like it. We do it every year. So, of course, we couldn't NOT do it again this year.

Ana with her pumpkin (the one with Mr. Potato-like features), Seth with his pumpkin (the vampire), Miri in the general vicinity of her pumkin (the mini one in front with random marker markings), Andrea with her pumpkin (the vampire victim) and Bekah with her pumpkin (with her likeness).

Thank you, Berretts, for donating the pumpkins. As always, Seth is the mastermind behind the pumpkin carving theme.

This was a 1- or 2-minute exposure. I love the light glowing through the puncture marks.

(To view other years' pumpkins, click here, here, here, here, here and here.)