"I feel taller than last night."

Happy birthday, Emma. We love you.

Master and apprentice

For his fans

I am thankful for...

...indoor plumbing, when it works.

Brain freeze

Ethan and I are at DQ celebrating spell bowl.

He won't hold still for the camera

Those cheeks.

He likes to raise his eyebrows when he tells us a story

Overheard

SOPHIE: When they made the world they should have put more lights all around us.

(Last night she fell on some dark stairs outside and skinned her knee.)

Overheard

SOPHIE: You can't put pennies in the toaster. They'll get lost.

Andrew's team made it to the finals

They're losing to some high school kids though.

We're at Andrew's robotics smackdown

The kids made some amazing robots that pick up plastic rings and deposit them onto a horizontal pipe.

Overheard

ETHAN (coming into my office an hour after we put the kids to bed): Dad, can you print off a picture of Miss Piggy? I need to prove to Andrew that she has snake eyes.

It reminded me of this. He must have had some crazy bad dreams about muppets when he was little.

Overheard

SOPHIE: Is tomorrow Christmas?!!
ME: No.
SOPHIE: But then why is it supposed to snow?

The Incredible Bulk

It was...sucrose...poisoning.

We had the church "trunk or treat" last night.

We brought a "spider girl", a vampire (NOT Dracula), two skeletons and a mummy.

One friend said we should have dressed Henry up as a marshmallow. That would have been more fitting, for sure. He's squishy.

Here is Sophie's spider girl costume. What is a spider girl, you ask? We don't know. But she wears a headband with a spider in it. And she is cute. I don't know where she learned to hold her hands out like that in photos, but that's how she rolls.

Emma had some fangs that were supposed to attach with putty to her teeth, but they kept falling out. I think her real fangs are scarier anyway, dontcha think?

Here are the pumpkins. Andrew carved his own on the left (modeled after The Scream by Munch--his idea). Ethan had a dragon, Sophie had a kitty, and Emma had a butterfly.

We made this one for Henry. Picasa face recognition was smart enough to recognize a face in the photo. It guessed it was one of our relatives. The kids thought that was funny.

After the kids collected their loot, they got down to business. Sophie grabbed the scissors and started cutting open wrappers to save time. It's a technique she used all day.

Here is Ethan doing two lollipops at a time. Whatever it takes. My philosophy on Halloween candy is: "Eat it until you're sick," aka "Get it over with all at once."

He taught Sophie the same trick:

Later they started doing three at a time. Sophie finished all of her candy in less than 24 hours, and we're all better for it.

Ginger's going to post a video to her blog called "The Effects of Sugar On Our Children." You will want to check it out. It is almost unbelievable.

Tonight we stayed home and handed out candy at the door while we watched Ethan, Sophie and Emma literally bounce off the walls. And when I say "literally" I'm not just employing a figure of speech. I mean they literally bounced off the walls.

Meanwhile, Andrew, Henry, Ginger and I played Scrabble.