Oct 14

Here are the beautiful snow-capped Wellsvilles in bright autumn colors that signal the true beginning of the fall season here in Logan.



















And here is another, slightly less romantic, reminder that it is fall- the annual Boxelder bug infestation. It seems to be worse this year than others. They're completely harmless, but pretty darn disgusting.














So, Cecily loves pumpkins. And James bought her one, but it was too big for her to haul around, so when she saw a little one at Jacob and Kara's house, they told her that it could come and stay at our house for a while. She watched TV with it, took a bath and went potty with it watching and, as you can see, she needed it in the bed with her to go to sleep.



















Elliot taking a break from his soccer game.


Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

My mom taught her students "Dimelo" this week because they were studying Spain and Enrique Iglesias. I love that song. She made a movie of me singing along with it. We'll have to let you see it later. This week when Paige came to play we took all of the couch cushions off of the couch and bounced on it like it was a trampoline. Then we arranged all of the cushions on the floor. I was being pretty bossy and telling Paige exactly what to do and my dad said, "Boy, Cecily sure acts like the Alpha female around Paige." And Mommy said, "She acts like the Alpha female around me, too." Then, while Paigey and I were playing, Laura's mom called and said someone was coming over to look at their house, because they're selling it and building a new one down our block. So Laura and Chloe came over. We had a tea party. It was so fun. Chloe is Laura's dog. We were having fun chasing her around the house, but I got really scared whenever she turned around and started to chase us. I love pumpkins. Daddy bought me a big pumpkin at the store and I love it. But what's really great is the pumpkin at Jonah's house. I loved it so much that Jacob said that it could come and spend the night with me at my house. So I wouldn't go to bed without it and slept in my bed with the pumpkin. And it watched me go potty and take a bath. We're really really good friends. We've had lots of boxelder bugs at our house. They're yucky. I went on a couple of bike rides this week. I love to make Mommy and Daddy ride through the crunchy leaves. And both times we stopped at the park and I got to swing on the swings. As of now, I still do not have a fear of heights or motion sickness! I like to have those swings pushed really high! Well, I really need to get back to being cute.

Love,

Cecily

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

I went to Young Women's on Tuesday and we decided to tie blankets for a family. It was really fun. We had fishy crackers and Wheat Thins and M and Ms and music and we socialized too. I went to the orthodontist and he told me that I needed to get two teeth pulled down so on Thursday I went again and they took these sort of like button brackets and put them on my teeth after they carved them out and then put elastics on them so they had to be pulled down. So hopefully I can be done with braces now instead of waiting for those teeth to come down. He said I had really tough gum tissue and they might not have come down by themselves. We waited long enough. I had Parent Teacher conferences and my teachers said I did pretty well, except math, which was a B. I could do better. I got to talk to Mrs. Brasfield, who was my French teacher, about Mexico and she thought it was really fun. Sometimes I want to play with her baby because she's so cute. And sometimes she comes to visit her. I went to Beadles on Friday with my friend Amy and I made a necklace to go with my purple shirt that I wore to church today. And I made a pair of earrings. Amy made a really long necklace with a blue shell thing and some earrings with bumpy beads and blue pearls. We had fun. I had a Beadles certificate because that's what Elliot gave to me for my birthday. And while we were there we saw Penny. Hailey's sister. Most of the time people were calling so we didn't get to talk to her or see her that much. I am reading _Twilight_ and _Ann of Green Gables #5_. That's what I got for Grandma and Grandpa Willmore's gift certificate. And I love _Twilight_ so much that I bought the next two books, _New Moon_ and _Eclipse_ with Grandma and Grandpa Parnell's gift certificate. I won't ruin it for you, but it's about a girl who likes a boy who's dangerous in a way.....

Love,

Audrey

Dear Grandma and Grandpa,

I had a game on Monday and we played well. We played against some girls on their team. My friend Stuart, who's usually the goalie, and he said "If a girl scores on me you're going to have to come in for me." He thought he would have been embarrassed if a girl scored a goal on him. I played really well but then on the way home I got sick and threw up all night. I went to Scouts on Tuesday and we learned about the flag and how to respect it and how to take it down and the different kind of flags and what it means to us. Thursday I got to stay after school because it was a half day and play with my friends and then my mom came and met me for the book fair and she got me a joke book and then we went to my SEP conferences. And Mrs. Kelley said that I was doing really good. And she gave me a candy. My goals were to make sure papers get to my mom and back to school, to read with Cecily more, and then to do more challenge spelling words. I went from there I went to my Primary activity and our activity was making cookies and decorating pumpkins and then we did the three-legged races. Thorin was my partner. We won second and the first two teams to win would get to go on. Rachel and Micah won. Because they had a trick that the legs that were tied together, they said "one" for it and they said "two" for the other legs. And they could do it really fast. Me and Thorin tried to do that and we couldn't do it. So we won second until it was the little kids. Then we decorated pumpkins. THen I had to go right to soccer practice. We started out with like passing the ball and then we started out with this thing that we would attack in our game, but we didn't really do that. We got really out of it and nobody except me and Alex C were listening, we were just goofing off. And it might have hurt us later. Because we had to do three laps around the field and then in our game our coach said how we practice is how we play, so we lost our game on Saturday. And I got to play with Austin on Friday because there was no school. We had fun. And then, about losing our soccer game, Max's dad gave a talk in church today and he said that just like in a game you have to play hard the whole way through if you want to win, you have to be good your whole life if you want to be happy. It reminded of my game because once they scored the second goal on us we just, like, gave up. We're really good and we should be undefeated but when teams get ahead of us because we practice bad, we just think "oh, we can't catch up now." We just need to keep playing hard all the way through. We could have won that game like 5-3. But we didn't. Love you.

Elliot