We didn't go to Bates Nut Farm last year when Hannah was in half-day kindergarten because it's too far to drive to have to be back by noon, so I wanted to make sure we went this year. We went with our neighbor friend, Kaya (2 1/2) and her mom.

The girls loved collecting the corn scattered on the ground and feeding it to the sheep.

Is your Mama a Llama?

We let the girls pick one ride to go on and they chose the ponies.

We also gave them a free wheelbarrow ride!

Then we went to check out the pumpkins.

Oh, the many poses of Ellie!

She's officially a ham!

Jazz hands!

Don't they look like little pumpkin thieves?

I always love looking back at our old visits to Bates Nut Farm: 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

This is going to be a longer camera dump than usual...

My mom comes and watches Ellie for me every Friday so I get to help in the kids' classrooms. Joey's teacher has these pictures of the kids up in her classroom.

Hannah sometimes gets to come over and read to me when I'm in her classroom helping. By the way, the outfit she's wearing? It's one of her favorites right now!

Thursday mornings, three other moms and I have a little playgroup. We take turns dropping off our girls at each other's houses. So, three Thursdays a month I have a morning to myself, and once a month I host five little girls.

Ellie really loves playing with them, especially the oldest girl. They are buds.

They are honestly the sweetest group of girls!

After we went to the Wild Animal Park by ourselves, a week later we met up with some friends from church. I just love her and her sons, and we had such a great time together. I'm so glad we both have passes!

Hannah and Ellie love to "style" Andy's hair.

Then apparently Ellie likes to pose with him. Can you tell which girl has a flair for drama and which one is a little more shy (aka not pictured)?

The kids had been looking forward to "Picture Day" since the beginning of school. Actually, as soon as Joey got his ring bearer outfit this summer he decided to wear it for picture day. Hannah said, "Picture Day is the best day of the year because everyone gets dressed up all fancy!"

I had to take this picture of Hannah's soccer team all lined up because she's a head taller than everyone else on her team. It cracks me up!

Speaking of soccer, Ellie and I have spent a lot of time under our new "Sport-Brella" as it's been another roasting hot soccer season. This umbrella has been a lifesaver. Why did it take me so long to buy it?!

Recently, I randomly learned how to french braid hair. I've been having fun trying out different styles on the girls' hair. Hannah is very picky about her appearance so she doesn't love everything I've tried, but overall she's THRILLED that I can actually braid her hair in fancy ways.

We had our first rainy day so Joey came down looking like this. I think the high for the day was still in the 70's so his "rain gear" made me laugh."

Saturday morning cartoons with Octavian. He's fitting in very well with our family!

This girl is NOT a cuddler, so Andy was soaking up the rare snuggles!

Then things got goofy!

Awww, two Daddy's girls.

They are both pretty silly!

We went back to the zoo a couple of weeks ago, this time we went back to Legoland!

Our passes expired about a year ago, but for some reason Legoland sent us two free guest passes that they normally only send to members.

We went with my friend Cori. Her youngest and Ellie are friends so it worked out well.

 The girls loved the new "Lego Friends" carousel!

 The new Lego Friend area was really fun to see. They had a stable area with lots of Legos out to build.

Ellie got to sit with the Lego Friends,

 but then she got to meet the REAL girls!

We saw a short 4D Lego movie. She seemed to love it, but later she said it was too scary.

Here's Ellie on the same pumpkin a year ago! (Scroll to the very end of the post.)

This was the first time Ellie could ride on the horse ride. She was a fan.

She also loved her old favorites, like this swing (although she barely fit in it),

the boat ride,

the cars,

and the helicopter ride.

Her two favorite rides by far were the airplanes...

and the "Beetle Bounce."

When we got back to the car Ellie said, "Wow! I had a busy day!" Sure enough she fell asleep on the way home and stayed sleeping in the garage for about half an hour.

This is the post I was hesitant to publish, because it's just a nerdy post about me getting excited about food related organization. Ridiculous, I know. But, hey, I wrote it, I might as well use it...

For the past several years, my kids have gotten to pick one of a handful of fairly healthy, pretty easy options for breakfast. However, I was getting more and more annoyed with often making four different breakfasts in the morning and having kids hem and haw forever while trying to decide what to pick. So, right before school started, I announced a new breakfast policy. We were picking seven breakfast options, assigning them a day of the week, and that's what all three of the kids would be having. Joey handled the transition extremely well because I let him assign which day they would have each meal. He loved having control of that and didn't even complain about the change. Hannah is pretty sweet in general, so I knew she would be fine with it. For some reason though, I didn't even think about how Ellie would react. The answer? Not well. She FLIPPED OUT the first morning when she found out she didn't get to pick her breakfast. COMPLETELY LOST IT. The funny thing is that after the first day she was completely on board with our new system. So, here's our list for the week:

Monday-Apple with peanut butter or cinnamon
Tuesday-Peanut butter or butter toast
Wednesday-Tortilla day (cheese or peanut butter roll up)
Thursday-Smoothies (we might have to change this one come winter)
Friday-Oatmeal
Saturday-Waffles, Pancakes or French Toast
Sunday-Special toast (toast with jelly or honey)

Now that breakfast was taken care of, I decided to tackle packing school lunches. I really dread packing lunches in the morning, but it's been so much easier now that I got more organized. I made a list of four different categories and all the options within those categories. Now I just make sure I pack one from each category and I'm good to go. It was a simple change (and really not blog worthy), but for some reason it's made packing lunches so much easier and mindless for me. I also feel good knowing their lunches are fairly balanced:

Once my morning routine was improved, I then turned my attention to dinner. In general, my goal for dinner is to have a main dish, a vegetable and a salad. It's ridiculous how often I fail at that easy standard. Usually I can just get it together enough to have serve a vegetable or a salad. Just recently I've discovered a few simple things that have really helped me meet this goal pretty much every night. First of all, I found this pretty picture on Pinterest:

Picture courtesy of Simple Vegan Blog

I don't follow the recipe on that blog at all, but it looked like such a good mix to grill. Now, every Wednesday after I go shopping for all my produce, I cut all these veggies up and put them in a big bowl in the fridge. Then, throughout the week, I just grab some of the mix, toss it with a little coconut oil, sprinkle it with this delicious Creole seasonings (pictured below), and grill it in my grill basket. 

My new strategy for making sure I have a salad for dinner is so basic and obvious that it doesn't actually qualify as a "strategy." I just always make sure I have lettuce washed, dried and chopped in tupperware in the fridge. It makes throwing a salad together much less daunting for some reason. I also have been doing a better job at actually meal planning for salads and not just main dishes.

Oh, and our favorite salad recently? I use this dressing (with or without grilled chicken) with this salad with...wait for it...Fritos!!! Andy gets so happy when that is our dinner for the night! YUM!

I'm really excited about all these new food systems I have in place, and I hope I can keep them up. Sometimes I'm great at things for a while, and then I lose my momentum. (Just ask me about my daily cleaning schedule!)

So, there you have it, the most ridiculously boring blog post ever. :-)

It's funny, when I wrote that blog title, I was referring to how Ellie and I went to the Safari Park (formerly known as the Wild Animal Park) for the first time in a long time, but it also could refer to my unplanned blogging absence. Sorry about that! Part of the problem is that September was mostly spent getting back into the school/soccer routine, and part of the problem is that I was working on a blog post that I'm not crazy about. I still haven't decided if I'm even going to post it, but we'll see.

Back to the post for today. When the kids were getting ready to go back to school in August, I told Ellie that I would get us a zoo pass. We didn't have a pass last year because Hannah had half day kindergarten and the early pick up time didn't give us enough time to go, so we were looking forward to going again. Ellie actually doesn't remember the zoo at all, so she was especially excited.

This morning before school Joey told Ellie about a gorilla he saw dancing one time, so that was the first place she wanted to go. We saw a cute little baby gorilla, but no dancing.

Then Ellie wanted to head down to the lions. The funny thing about Ellie (probably due to her inexperience with zoos) is that whatever animal she wanted to see next, that was the only animal she was interested in seeing. She didn't understand the concept of looking at each animal along the way. She was a little impatient when I tried showing her any other animal. It was funny, but she seemed to figure it out a little more the longer we were there.

In spite of that, she was happy to make a quick stop at the water area on our way to see the lions. It might be October, but it's still roasting here!

I wasn't sure how interested she would be in the 30 minute tram ride, but she seemed to like it and didn't get too antsy.

For lunch we headed over to the playground to eat and play. Well, Ellie played. I enjoyed the peace, quiet and scenery in the shade. 

Then we went to the bird show which Ellie really liked. Two birds swooped right over our head which thrilled her, and she loved the African Grey parrot that "talked." At the end they had this cute little horn bill that would take a dollar out of your hand for a donation if you held it in the air. Ellie did it and was so excited when he took it. She shouted out, "It wasn't even spicy!" Ha! She meant she didn't feel anything sharp like his claws or beak.

 The petting zoo was another highlight.

She loved getting to brush the animals. She was cracking up because this one kept snapping his head back to look at her when she brushed him.

 We had such a fun time and can't wait to go back!