What we have been up to

The moment everyone has been waiting for is here-a blog update.
I put this on Belle's head once and she thought it was funny and kept doing it.

Belle is crawling all over the place and standing up on everything she can get her hands on.

Her hair is finally getting long enough for a ponytail! Here is her first ever ponytail. She looks so big in this picture! At her 9 month checkup she was 18 lbs 11 oz. She is still in the 10% for height (don't remember the measurement) and she has moved up to the 40% for weight (she is a great eater!). She has 2 teeth on the bottom and we are thinking another tooth is going to poke through soon.

We have also been spending a bunch of time with family lately. My dad's younger sister and all her family came from Arizona for Halloween weekend. It was so fun to see all of them and show them life in the country. We also got to participate in the famous Ford Halloween/Cider extravaganza (my father's older sister and her family). They all come to Quincy and have a big cider pressing party followed by a Halloween party-complete with games and a spook alley. Belle didn't even cry in the spook alley-such a brave girl. Just this last weekend all of Jarod's family came to Quincy do enjoy the farm life as well: shooting, apples, pressing cider, and four wheelers of course. We loved having everyone here and hope it becomes an annual thing!

Cute pics

Belle loves her daddy. She can't get enough of Jarod and cries when he puts her down and leaves for work.

She can be so smiley and giggly.

The bunny slippers crack me up.

Halloween!

For Halloween we were a bear family (Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and baby bear). Here is Belle modeling a pair of bear ears I made for Jarod and me.

She did not like the hood of her costume when I first put it on.

She eventually warmed up. She was so cute and cuddly in this little costume.

Hope's 2nd Birthday

It's hard to believe that my little baby would have been 2 years old. I still think about her every second of every day and miss her more and more. She would have been so different now than the baby in our pictures.

The little half green half orange gourd was our favorite.

Grandma sharing cupcakes with Belle (she kind of liked it)

Tiffy this is for you!

Moving and Hunting

So we have moved across the street from my parents into my grandparents old house. It's a 3 bedroom 3 bath house with about 2000 square feet on the main floor and a full unfinished basement. We are loving all the space. Belle finally has her own room which is nice and I have a sewing room. Jarod has a garage for all his tools and motorcycle parts. Its still really crazy with boxes everywhere but it is slowly getting there. There are a good number of things that need to be fixed up and redone but that will take time. One of the first projects to be done is working on the landscaping. Jarod has been working on the sprinklers for several weekends trying to get them in working order-he is almost done. Almost all of the shrubs and plants around the house are going to be ripped out. They have just gotten so over grown and huge that you can't even see the house and we can hardly see out the windows.

A couple of mornings ago Jarod woke up at 6 am to answer the door. He came back to bed and I asked him what he was doing and he said he heard someone knocking. Well about an hour or so later we hear the knocking on the back of the house and come to the conclusion that it must be a woodpecker. Jarod puts on a bathrobe and grabs his shotgun. A few minutes go by and I hear a gunshot followed by a yell of delight. He got the woodpecker on the first shot. (We think it was a pair though so more hunting may be in order). The woodpecker was really colorful and big (we think it was a male and his mate is still hanging around-I heard knocking early yesterday morning...)

Saturday was Farmer-Consumer Awareness Day in Quincy (that is our town festival). Here is Jarod and Belle at the parade. We say a lot of great tractors and farm equipment and there was even a group of Latin Horse riders that make their horses dance to music-they were very entertaining. Belle was so tired for a lot of the parade that she didn't know quite what to think. At the very end were the fire trucks blowing their horns and sirens and Belle got the saddest face. I had to walk away with her to get her to calm down. After the parade we enjoyed the booths, the quilt show, and some yummy BBQ-compliments of my father's Rotary Club. It was perfect weather for the day and we sure had fun.

Cannin' & Jammin'

My parents have 3 peach trees in their backyard and so we have been canning and making jam like crazy.

We made 8 quarts of freezer jam. We froze three gallon bags of peaches.

And canned 27 quarts of peaches. Nothing like a big project to break in your new kitchen.