Riley and Avery

This is what greets me after realizing that he girls have been playing quietly together (a rarity) for a while, while I was talking to Mom on the telephone. And don't think that the rest of Avery's body didn't match. Her tummy was painted, her hands, arms, legs, her feet. Oh, yay!

We had snow yesterday morning. Riley was thrilled, Avery not so much. Avery thought the snow was a good idea in theory. She wouldn't leave the porch.

We went to Boo at the Zoo on Saturday. Riley loved it so much and said that she wished that she lived at the zoo. What, you mean we don't live in a zoo already? It was cool seeing the zoo at night, lights in the trees and jack-o-lanterns lining the walk-ways. We went into a haunted house that Riley was probably a year or two too young for. She was pretty scared. We took the free shuttle from a nearby shopping center into the zoo, since it was crazy crowded. On the way back to the car, Avery and Riley are clutching their bags of candy and eating carrot sticks that I brought. Avery wouldn't put on her costume. She kept shaking her head, saying "LIKE it!" which means that she doesn't like it. We ran into a few people that we knew, so that was fun.

Riley had a birthday party on Sunday for a girl in her school who was turning six. The party was at their house way way way far out in the country. Oh, it was so far away. All the other children were also from Riley's school, and all the parents stayed versus driving so far to go somewhere else and then coming back. I mean, come on, they live on a dirt road. For the love of pete, they get coyotes there! All in all it was a lot of fun. The girl's father recently split with her mother, from what I can tell. So he's a single father. And he's from Billings, Montana. So I guess the homesteading mentality is natural to them. He's a general contractor and has added onto their house and manages to selvage quite a lot from the properties he works on and is saving the materials up in his barn to build a brand new house on the land. I wouldn't sleep in a TENT that Rudi had put up himself, much less a whole darn house.

When we got home from the birthday party, we went right over Kelly's house for Courtney and Caitlynn's birthday party, but that is a whole 'nuther story that deserves its own post...