Miscellaneous October

While Fall is slowly settling in with a few new leaf colors here and there and cooler temperatures, we're settling in to life as a family with a vengeance. Our family calendar for October is completely crazy, but in a totally good way.

School stuff includes three teacher conferences, two book fairs, Family Reading Night at Claudia's school, a school field trip to Connor Prairie (Jordan), Donuts For Dads (Sam), and a band concert (Claudia).

Social stuff will be two meet and greets with the democrats--one with children and one at a bar without children and we joined a group of families at our God-optional church that does stuff every month and that should be fun because everyone we've met has been really interesting.

It looks like Jordan and Sammy are going to be starting Brownies and will be in the same troop so they'll be meeting either every week or every other week. Fair warning—we'll be selling Girl Scout cookies in February!

The girls have their fall break this month. Sam's is a couple of days and Claudia and Jordan will be out of school for a week and will probably be in Texas for at least part of that (that's October 23-27 for those of you in Texas).

October 22nd, we're going to Chicago to see the awesome Jason and Leah run the Chicago Marathon. Jamie and Sammy went last year and said they had a blast and that Leah's dad, Scott, organized everyone in such a way that they got to see Jason and Leah at various points along the course.

I volunteered at a homeless shelter and orientation is coming up so I'll be doing that. I think Claudia's religious education class is working with the same organization this year, so that's pretty exciting.

And I should have a new job by then (fingers crossed!) and Jamie's started tutoring algebra and trig and he's going to be preparing to take the first actuarial exam that's in November.

And then, of course, there's Halloween. We're already decorating and trying to figure out party food and costumes. So far Jordan's going to be Audrey Hepburn, I'm going to do something with a beehive hairdo (either put chenille bees all over it or go as the urban legend and have spiders coming out of it) and everyone else is undecided.