Champion Times Two!

Before I begin, let me just start off by saying that there will be no photos today. I took my camera to Ritz Camera at the mall on Friday. They don't fix cameras there but referred me to the only place in Orlando that fixes Cannon cameras. I'll probably take it there tomorrow. In the meantime, I was expecting to use my old camera. Unfortunately, we can't find the memory card that fits it. I suppose we could go buy one to fit it but just haven't. I borrowed Megan's camera yesterday and took some pictures but now when I went to get the pictures off the camera, the memory card is humongous (I think the camera is kindof old) and it won't fit into either my computer or Duncan's. So that's the scoop with the lack of pictures.

Last night we went to the 7th annual Pumpkin Fest which is hosted by Allen and Tangie and MC'd by Adam Heck. Ron & Elaine came over to baby-sit so Duncan and I could really relax and enjoy ourselves. We got there around 7 pm along with Shannon, Megan, David, and two friends of David's, Julie and Kendy. Allen and Tangie have moved out to Ocoee (which we call Tampa because it seems like it takes forever to get there) to a giant, beautiful home. Their bedroom is practically the size of our whole downstairs (and I'm only slightly exaggerating on that). It's the perfect size house to have a group of 50 people there. Since the theme is "pumpkin" everyone brings a dish made of either pumpkin or squash. There was a ton of food: entrees, appetizers, desserts, you name it. I made a vegetarian pumpkin chili that I found on the Internet. They had a contest in which everyone voted for their favorite overall dish. And my chili won! Clearly it pays to have a lot of cousins but everyone did say it really was delicious. I may post the recipe in the near future since it's quite easy to make.

We played a bunch of games and as usual, they were lots of fun. I always get good games ideas at Pumpkin Fest for us to play at Christmas. I was randomly paired up with a girl names Lyris for some of the games and we won a game in which you had to figure out what acronyms stand for (SCUBA, NCAA, etc). The big event of the night is a game called Tank. One of the team members puts on a blind fold, and gets on their hands and knees while the other team member is the driver. There are little balls on the floor and the point is for the tank person to throw balls at other tanks to get them out. Since they can't see, the driver has to tell them where to go and where to aim and also blocks them from other tanks that are throwing balls to get them out. So Lyris was the tank and I was the driver. And we ended up winning! With so many people there, you can imagine that there were a lot of teams so we were quite pleased with ourselves, especially being two women. Yay! We got a trophy for that and then I also got my chili trophy. You could say it was a very successful evening. We really did have a great time.

Late Friday afternoon, Cory, Amanda, and Noah arrived. I would love to insert a picture here so you could see how big Noah has gotten. He's already had about 4 haircuts - no fair! He's such a boy. He was climbing on top and over everything he could reach. He found Calleigh's bat and sure loved to swing that thing around. As seems to be typical of most little boys we run into at this age, his vocabulary isn't as vast as Calleigh's. He says about three or four words. Amanda was impressed with Calleigh but I assured her, it really seems like this is what happens with boys.

On Sabbath, we all headed to Forest Lake. When you tell Calleigh that it's Sabbath and ask where do we go on Sabbath, she says "Sabbath School" and then always says "more people." Apparently she must really like Sabbath School because she kept saying it today and I had to tell her that it won't be Sabbath again for six more days. Because of the mother's room being closed, I really tried to get her to be quiet during the sermon. We lasted about 10 minutes (in which I kept saying that we needed to be quiet and talk in our quiet voice) but finally, it was just too much. She was really talking loudly and started having a little tantrum over something so we had no choice but to depart. We had to go to a little atrium for the rest of the service which was a real bummer because I wasn't able to hear the rest of Mark Finley's sermon.

Calleigh was really cute in Sabbath School. She was sitting in one of the little chairs with the rest of the kids but then noticed the little red rocking chair that was up front but off to the side (this is the chair they bring out for the birthday person). She got up, went and got the chair, and set it down right next to the teacher. She then sat down and spent the next little while just sitting up there about one foot from the teacher. I guess she likes to be very close to the action!

So has the time change screwed you up at all? I guess for most people the hour is a little bonus. For someone with a child, not so much. Calleigh is on a great schedule of going to bed at 7:45 every night, waking up at 7:30 every morning, and going down for a nap every afternoon at 1:15. If you change the time by an hour, that gets all messed up. Last night Ron & Elaine kept her up a little later than normal to try and get her adjusted and also so she hopefully wouldn't wake up at 6:30. As expected, it wasn't exactly successful. At 6:10, she was awake and standing up. I went in and put her binky back in and she laid down for another 1/2 hour. So we were up for the day at 6:40. The three of us left at about 9:45 to go up to Mount Dora to show Duncan the town and to meet up with my friend Karri. We walked around a bit and then went to a greasy spoon for breakfast around 11:15. We decided to leave after that which was 1:15 the old time - - nap time! So we tried every thing we could think of to get her to stay awake on the way home. We knew if she fell asleep in the car, she wouldn't go back to sleep when we got home and that would really screw her up. About two-thirds of the way home, I took over driving so Duncan could take over the stay awake operation. We made it! We got home at 1:15 new time which was perfect. She went to sleep and woke up at about 4:00.

We had a quiet evening at home and went through the usual "Boy, I can't believe that it's only 6 o'clock. It's dark and it seems so late." I was determined to keep Calleigh up and entertained to as close to the new 7:45 as I could. She finally went to bed around 7:40. The big question is what time she'll get up in the morning. If it's after 7:00, I'll be happy and I'll feel like we've adjusted to standard time.

One new thing that Calleigh is doing is helping me flush the toilet. Since it's getting to the time where you can start thinking about potty training, I've at least started Calleigh with coming into the bathroom with me each time I go so I can tell her what I'm doing. Then I have her do the flush and we say "Bye, bye, pee-pee." Now, each time she sees me head into the bathroom, she runs from wherever she is and starts yelling "button, button." Apparently it is very exciting to do the flush!

Well, I think that about covers the update for now. We're watching the Patriots game, of course. I'm sure we'll be pretty tired by the time it gets to the end.