Playing in the Leaves

Autumn this year has been really nice. The leaves are so pretty and colorful. The boys have enjoyed taking walks and crunching the leaves with their feet. Eli likes to make leaf angels (like snow angels). It seems kinds of uncomfortable to me, but he likes it. The other day some neighbor girls raked a big pile of leaves and invited Eli and Diego to play with them.

Eli's Friend Birthday Party

Eli had a Nick's birthday party this year. We live right across the street from Nick's Garden Center and each October they have a fall festival all month long. His friends came over and then we all walked across the street to Nick's. It was a really warm day- hot actually. It was super busy at Nick's so it was a challenge to keep all the kids together and not loose any. Thank goodness my sister and mom were there to help Cesar and I. My dad was a big help too because he stayed at home with Diego while he napped. Eli invited four friends.
They loved the train ride.

We all had fun playing the games they had there.

I made Eli a big chocolate chip cookie cake.

Eli's Family Birthday Celebration

Cesar made another amazing cake this year! He has done such a great job with Eli's cakes.

Eli smiled so big when the family all sang happy birthday to him. He was so happy!

Eli's Birthday

Eli turned 4 on October 10th. Cesar took the day off from work and we all went to Monkey Bizness. We went once in March for Diego's birthday and Eli has been talking about it ever since. They give free admission on birthdays.

Eli is such a sweet, funny, handsome, smart, cute, nice boy! I love that he is my son. He likes playing games on pbskids.org and the friend magazine website. He likes riding his bike outside on the sidewalk. He loves saying hi to our neighbors especially Bill because he always gives the boys Popsicles or candy. Eli likes playing with friends and he really enjoyed preschool. Eli is a nice brother to Diego. He out of the blue tells me and Cesar that he loves us so much. He says nice prayers all by himself. He loves looking and "reading" books and can spend over an hour just sitting down looking at books. He knows most of the letters and can write some too. He has been waking up at exactly 7:30 in the morning lately. He comes into our room and climbs into bed with me. I ask him to look at the clock and tell me the time. He always tells me the time backwards. If it is 7:32 he will say, "It is 2, 3, 7."

Three one year olds

Today I'm taking care of three one year olds. It's been fun and reminds me of working at SLICC and MAC.

Eli went to the zoo with my mom and Ivaras.

The last week

Last weekend we went to Evan's birthday party in the park. Evan is Cesar's sister's son- Eli and Diego's cousin. It was a nice party. Here is Eli hitting the pinata. We had fun together playing at the park and eating.
Diego at Evan's party. He likes dogs- more than I do anyways.

Monday night we went to the Botanic Gardens. The boys and I had a good time playing in the children's garden and then Cesar met us after work for a picnic dinner. It was fun to see all my boys running and playing in the nice green grass. We also met some friends there. After dinner and playing we walked around a little bit in the gardens.

Saturday and Sunday was General Conference. The boys did pretty good and Cesar and I got to pay attention pretty well. Here they are playing in the laundry basket.

Saturday we also went to the circus! It was fun. We went with LaResa and her kids. Eli had fun sitting next to Ivaras. Diego actually fell asleep while sitting on my lap for about 20 minutes- he rarely does that so he must have been pretty comfortable. We had free kids tickets from the library so it was an okay deal.

Reading

We checked out a Thomas the train book from the library a few weeks ago and Diego loved it! I've never seen him like a particular book so much. When we went to turn it in at the library he cried. We did check out another Thomas book though. The one he is reading in the picture is actually one of our books, but the library ones are always preferred :).
We started getting the Sunday newspaper so I can start using coupons. Eli really enjoyed reading the comics yesterday. He would look at the pictures and make up his own words. Both Cesar and I read some of the comics to him, but none of us thought they were funny at all! Eli definitely did a better job at making up his own words. This morning he looked through the Toys R Us ad and liked pointing out all the characters he knows.