Well, I had this post written last night, and blogger must've eaten it. So I'm starting all over again! Anyway... my blogger friend, Elle, suggested that while we are in our waiting, that it might be a good idea to post about everyday life. And the more I thought about that, the more sense it makes! We live away from so many family & friends...so it will give you all a way to keep up with us...and for us, it will be a great way to journal our life while we wait. It may surprise you, but we do more than "just" gathering papers & sitting by the mailbox (though often it seems like it's not MUCH more than that! :)

So...I'll start with carving pumpkins (again). In the past several years, we've waited till practically Halloween to get our pumpkins to carve. It's always fun, but we aren't able to enjoy our jack-o-lanterns for long enough! So this year, we decided to do something different...to actually carve our pumpkins earlier! Well...no one told us that we actually had been doing it right, and that you should only carve a pumpkin 2-3 days out from Halloween! (and if no one has told YOU that, either, take heed!) If you do it much farther out than that (say....2 weeks?) the jack-o-lantern will rot, turn fuzzy on the inside, and pretty much fall apart, leaving a nasty black stain on the porch!

Having had that happen to us a couple weeks ago, we waited till we just couldn't wait any longer...and we carved a couple more pumpkins last night. Hopefully they'll make it a couple more days and then we'll feed them to the compost pile.

Anyway... Sarah (my sister) was here, so she carved a pumpkin with us. It was quite fun, and evidently her first experience (I think dad always carved our pumpkins with us, and if you know me & my siblings well, you'll understand why - can you imagine 4 crazy chillin running around with carving saws - or worse yet, knives?!? - yeah, we ususally drew our designs on the pumpkin & dad carved it out for us). So I took some pictures - lest you think we are in our Halloween costumes already, I will warn you that we are completely makeupless, AND wearing the silly plastic bibs that came with our pumpkin carving tool kit. It was fun - so without any further blabbing on about it...here are our pictures: