September

Ryan bid on a Vegas weekend getaway at our ward's youth auction back in the spring, so we decided to use it over Labor Day weekend as a sort of late anniversary trip.  We bought cheap airplane tickets to fly our friends' daughter Mariah down to babysit the older four kids, but planned to take the baby.

Anyway, on Friday before the trip, I started noticing fire helicopters buzzing past on a regular basis, and as the day progressed, we realized that there was a forest fire in the Verdugo Mountains behind our home.  We kept an eye on the news, picked up Mariah from the airport as scheduled, and kept driving across the valley to see what was going on, but nothing seemed very close to our neighborhood.  Saturday morning, the fire seemed just as far off, so we made sure the sitter knew what to do in an emergency and left for our trip.

About an hour into the drive, we started getting text messages from church people asking if we were evacuating, and finally realized that good parents probably wouldn't be leaving their kids in the path of a fire.  Yeah.  So, we went back home and bundled up all our kids and keepsakes.  We left the keepsakes and bunnies at a friend's house, and took the kids and babysitter with us.  An evacuation did get called that afternoon for our neighborhood, but by then we were on our way to Caesar's Palace.  Not bad for an evacuation shelter, I guess!  The La Tuna fire ended up being the largest Los Angeles fire in 50 years, but luckily, our area was fine.
    

Oak Leaf Ash (In-N-Out Parking Lot)

We listened to "Grapvine Fires" while eating dinner.

Saturday Morning

Mariah is SO good at doing kids' hair!

On Our Way out of Town

Elise sent a cute text to her friend Sarah.

 
We spent all of Sunday relaxing and eating yummy food, and it was actually better than we'd planned, since Mariah was able to watch everyone in the hotel room, including Celeste.  Fancy restaurants are much better without babies in them.  We headed home Monday morning, which was Labor Day and Celeste's first birthday!  She had a delicious birthday breakfast from MacDonalds, and an equally yummy dinner at Freddie's Steak Burgers.  I believe both meals were based on fried potatoes, actually.  We did a better job of celebrating the next day, with balloons and presents and cupcakes!
    

Happy Birthday Cici!

Ryan got to sit at the Los Angeles courthouse for a few days waiting to be interviewed for jury duty.  He read a lot of magazines, and earned $20 a day, but never did get selected.
  

The Thursday after Labor Day was the first day of school!  Connor started 7th grade, Elise 5th, Evan 2nd, and Corinne Kindergarten.  I decided to keep Evan home with me for the first semester, in order to give him a little more Mom Time.  Last year I felt like he was having a lot of meltdowns in the car after school, and he seemed to be getting overlooked after the new baby and everything.  This year we fully homeschooled him until Christmas Break, and it was a great experience.  I realized that 80% of his troubles come from simply being hungry, so we've become much more aware of what (and whether) he eats.  Plus, it was awesome to spend time alone with him, and to have a helper with baby Celeste!
    

Evan started tennis lessons at the community center, and loved it!  Corinne got to start gymnastics at the Little Gym, but for some reason I didn't get pictures of that.
  

Corinne kept asking when she was going to start learning piano.  The piano teacher thought this was just the saddest thing she'd ever heard, so I got railroaded into starting Corinne a year earlier than the other kids.  She loves the "beautiful" music she gets to play, and the performance aspect, but doesn't care for the hard work quite so much.
    

I found these index cards in a box of keepsakes.  Apparently I once had a five-year plan for myself!  Pretty cute. The secondary degree never happened, but I hit the marriage mark a year early.
   

At the end of September, we finally started the demo of our garage and bathroom projects.  The plan was to turn half of the garage into an attached playroom, and redo the kid bathroom into something with a tub.
  

These plans changed a little, but this is basically what we did.

We ended up flipping the shelves and tub.

Of course, it wouldn't be September without a pet praying mantis.  We lucked out this year and found a male as well as a female, so I wanted to see if they would mate without eating each other.  The internet said to make sure the female was full, and to make sure there was somewhere for the male to run away if he needed to, and it worked!
  

Mr. Mantis

Ryan bought a Hyperspin arcade unit from Bishop Gillins in the other ward, and put it in our garage.  It has every classic Atari, Nintendo, Genesis, etc. game you can think of.  Everyone still fights over it.
  

It was my turn to take Connor and Elise to an opera with our piano friends.  I had to drive and park downtown, which terrifies me, and we were 5 minutes late, so we had to watch the first act on a monitor in the lobby.  They still liked it, though.  It's a relatively good opera for kids (the sultry stuff just goes over their heads), and they told me afterwards it had much less stage-blood than Tosca did.
   

Random pictures that happened:
  

Corinne.  It's Frodo being stabbed by Sheilob, with the Eye in the distance.

The baby deer are still alive!

Quite a good acting range, this one.

Bishop Baby (Ward Council)

Dead lizard, flesh flies, and parasitic chalcid wasps.  Yay Nature!

Corinne again.  "It's an axe.", she said.

Watch out for her axe.

Elise

Family Home Evening.  Babies are distracting.

I liked this picture of Grandma, so I stole it off Facebook.