Mamma Debbie's in Phoenix

The Beck girls came for a few days to visit Mamma Debbie and Paul in Phoenix. We had dinner with them on Friday night. Tiffany brought baby Isabelle, and so these are pictures and a video of Erik and Sarah teaching Isabelle how to do "the worm." Tiffany and Michael are coming back for Thanksgiving; Tricia, Bill and kids are coming for Christmas; and Tracy and family are coming in February, so we're looking forward to seeing our adopted family members over the holidays!

Happy Halloween

Erik and two of his friends went trick-or-treating together. Erik is dressed like "Ed" from a cartoon called Ed, Edd, and Eddy. Frances is the skeleton and Jacob is The Joker. Jacob stayed with us a couple of days this past week while his parents were out of town, so it worked out really well that he could be here for Halloween night.

Sarah, dressed like a cat, with a cat.

We invited our neighbors to hang out in our driveway for a block party. I made chili and hot dogs, and they brought nachos and desserts. These are our next door neighbors, Beth and Mike.

This is Beth and Mike's front door. Much scarier in person than on this video...

These are some of the decorations in my front yard. Hard to see at night..but it's a huge spider web that I hung between two trees. The other decoration is my "graveyard."

These are the neighbors that live across the street from us, Amy and their daughter Courtney, who is in Sarah's class. Brad and Logan, 8, are not in the picture.

Dylan's new truck

My brother's son, Dylan, turned 16 and finally got a truck of his own. His sister, my niece Kelsey, is the beautiful girl in the truck bed. It's so hard to believe how big all the kids are getting!

Sarah's Zoo

It never ceases to amaze me what animal Sarah is willing to touch, pick up, or adopt. She definately didn't get that from me! This is a baby lizard she found at Grandma's house in Albuquerque. There are lots of full grown ones that live under the bushes around our house, but they run so fast that it's hard to see them normally. I've never seen a baby like this. It is kind of cute...

Baby Jacob and Mason

This is Lars' sister's baby, Jacob. He's almost a year (Nov.) so he's crawling and pulling up, almost walking with help. If you're wondering why all the photos show him attached to his mom's legs, that's because he is! He wouldn't let her out of his sight for one second!



Mason is big brother, who is two. You'll see him in the video trying to grab the camera out of my hand so he can take a picture too. He's talking up a storm now, repeating every word he hears. He was a ton of fun to play with!

Baby Hailey

This is Lars' brother's baby, Hailey. We saw her when she was newborn, and now at six months, she's much more entertaining! The kids just love to hold her and make her laugh. We bought her these cute little pink crocs - she liked chewing on them more than wearing them!

This is Lars' brother's new house being built in Albuquerque. The land was once a dairy farm, so pretty flat and not a lot of trees, but big size lots of an acre or more. Can't wait to see it finished, hopefully at Christmas!

Safford Reunion

Sarah got her face painted at the Safford High School reunion we went to on Friday night. Safford is where Lars grew up until his senior year in high school, when they moved to Albuquerque. It was a reunion for all the graduates in any year, which was kind of fun to see people from 18 to 81 there. We took off on Friday around 1:00 p.m. and got there about 5:00 because there was a bad accident that blocked the road so we had to drive about an hour out of the way to get around it. There was a bar-b-que dinner from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. and then the high school homecoming football game was from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. That was the first football game I've been to since I was in high school! Lars saw some of his former classmates, but no one I knew. There is one girl from his class, Michelle Clark, who happened to move to Cincinnati and was in our chuch ward when we were in Ohio. She still lives in Cincinnati and was apparently at the reunion, but we didn't run into her. Too bad! There was going to be a parade on Saturday, a pep rally, and a dance, but we came back home Friday night instead of staying over - all the hotels were full.