Manchester Herron family

Halloween 2008

2008-11-20T03:14:00.000-08:00

Not exciting but a great picture. The kids love "Photo Booth", a program on our Mac, and took this picture during a visit from Jenny (Vargo) Chodyniecki and Marci (Kruger) Charuba this summer. Ignore the messy dining room table behind the kids.

How can Halloween be over? Our traditional group shot on the porch, with the renovations done this summer. (Post to be added later on the porch.) Elijah was a robot, Amelia was "the floor of a movie theater", and both costumes were great fun to make. Ivy is hard to see in the picture because she's in back, but if you aren't from here you wouldn't understand her costume anyway. The Manchester high school team name is "the Flying Dutchmen" and the logo is a pair of wooden

shoes with wings. So Ivy and her friend Jessica made up the two halves of the logo, each has a wing and a shoe. It got a lot of rave reviews, and won a contest at the middle school. You will just have to take my word for it. Amelia and Elijah both won gift cards at my parents' club party (Amelia rarely leaves without an award from that party; we go every year and they just love her. The year she dressed like Teddy Roosevelt the judge said the prize was going to "The little girl with the moustache".)

Finally, one more funny Photo Booth picture. They do so love playing with that program, Ivy especially.

Flag football

2008-10-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Elijah is loving football even more this year. Flag football is great for moms because there is little contact and no injuries. We'll see how much I enjoy it when he's wearing pads and crashing into other little boys. I say, "boys", but he has a girl on his team, named Taylor. She is fast and generally runs the ball into the end zone before anyone realizes she's started running. In these pictures, Elijah is the one wearing red shorts. The top picture shows him ready to snap the ball; the bottom shows when (in another play, of course) he has just caught a pass and is ready to run.

Some things never change

2008-10-07T11:07:00.001-07:00

I just re-read last year's blog from around this time, and noticed that I mentioned the Buddy Walk (yes, it's the same family in both stories), and flag football. Hmmm.

When Kris asked if we'd post once a year...

2008-10-07T09:53:00.001-07:00

OK, so I lost the password and forgot how to post new entries. Luckily, cleaning out my e-mail inbox brought it back to my attention. Who needs to hear from us more often than once a year? Let's see, what have we done since LAST DECEMBER?Just kidding (I heard you sigh). We'll just start with recent. Here are a few highlights, chosen not because they were most important or significant, but mostly because had the camera along, so I can post some pictures.

Summer was great. I (Theresa) had to work some but not too much. Unfortunately, the summer Early On playgroups that we ran happened every other week, so I never had a solid three weeks off, but there are people with worse summer work schedules than mine so I'll stop complaining. (Early On provides services to children under age 3 with any delay in motor, speech, or other areas.) We had lots of time for other fun activities, like camping in Tahquamenon in June with my parents, visiting with friends, enjoying our community Fair, eating chicken at the Chicken Broil (along with some 14000 other hungry people) and giving our house a facelift.

Oh, and we attended a few Lansing Lugnuts baseball games (minor league). The girls were excited because they got to be on the big screen, dancing and being vivacious, not once but TWICE. We had great seats, thanks to a coworker of Jordan's. (Her husband works for them and got us free tickets.)

Now it's fall, school is in full swing, and we're running full tilt from one activity to the next. Jordan is still on Village Council, which takes him to three meetings a

month. I'm still on

PTSA at the Middle School, and on the search committee and other groups at our church. Ivy is playing volleyball for her school, Elijah is playing flag football in a nearby town, and Amelia is in choir and takes dance classes. Oh, and the girls are in Girl Scouts, and I'm one of Amelia's leaders. Fun stuff. Volleyball ends in less than 2 weeks, and football wraps up around then, too, so life will get a bit easier.

At the end of September, we participated in the Buddy Walk, an event to raise money

for Down Syndrome awareness and education. We have gotten close to a family with a toddler that has Down Syndrome; in the picture you can see Elijah pushing his stroller, but Wil

is being carried by his mom, behind them.

I have some great football pictures, so I'll make that a separate post. Sorry to take so long to update.......

Is once a month too often to post? :)

2007-12-09T19:09:00.000-08:00

Our faithful (and free) computer finally died this month, which I could use as an excuse for not posting, but I shouldn't. Because it died on a Monday and was replaced that Wednesday. We purchased a new iMac and LOVE IT. It's a desktop (hard to remember I can't just pop off to the coffee shop to download big files) but it's so COOL. Wireless keyboard that is the thickness of a credit card (maybe a tiny bit thicker but still pretty thin). Gigantic screen. We haven't had a new computer in a long time so the technology is pretty amazing.

We haven't had it long enough to buy kid software, but the kids discovered a program that came installed on the computer called "Photo Booth". Basically, it uses the teeny little computer camera and allows you to take pictures of yourself with funny special effects added in. Here is one of my favorites.

The kids (especially Ivy) have also enjoyed making little vignettes from their Photo Booth projects, and Ivy already knows more about the different editing programs (maybe iMovie?) we have available. She adds sound effects and captions, pretty cute stuff.

I suddenly noticed the time. I really will update this blog again soon.

Guess it's time...

2007-11-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

After reading our other family members' blogs for a few months, and getting pressure from other family members, we (Theresa) finally felt guilty enough to create a blog. It isn't that we don't recognize the convenience of posting pictures, etc., for anyone interested to see, it's more that we'll have to keep it up. But let's see how it goes.

This week saw Halloween AND Elijah losing his first tooth (at school, the best place to lose a tooth). Halloween is such a crazy time, getting costumes assembled and accessories in place, buying candy for the freeloaders- I mean, trick-or-treaters, getting kids ready for the several parties to which we are invited every year. This year, we had two parties that happened a full two weeks before Halloween, which helped me get in gear to get costumes finished early rather than at the last minute.

Since it's hard to see who is who in the group shot, Elijah is Bret Favre (Green Bay Packers- since we already owned the outfit, I got off easy this year), Amelia is GLITTER GIRL (a fashionable and glittery super hero of her own creation), and Ivy is a witch (timeless classic). We have several good friends that have kids our kids' ages, but live out of town, so they drive in to trick-or-treat with us. They also contribute big bags of candy, which is nice since we typically get 250 or more kids at the door each year. Their kids are the other kids in the photo.

This was the first year Elijah actually walked around town with us; in previous years he has done a block and then gone back to help Jordan hand out candy. He did well, especially considering Halloween this year was on a school day, including Halloween parties at the end of the day. So much fun for one day! I only have one "after" shot, but it says a lot. Amelia and her friend Christopher, resting in the wagon. Ahh, to be a kid on Halloween!

As usual, our town really goes crazy for Halloween. A local catering company made their entry into a fog-filled scary house with those portraits that change from people to skeletons when you walk by; the photo studio took pictures of each kid or group of kids and then gave away the prints later that night (must cost her hundreds of dollars); the old mill hosted a caramel apple assembly line for anyone that wanted one. And, of course, seeing all of our friends walking around, and several teachers and other people from school, which is always fun for the kids.

Perhaps related to candy eating (though it had been loose for weeks), Elijah lost his first tooth at school yesterday. He had been eating an apple and suddenly noticed a breeze on his tongue- looked at the apple, looked down at the table, then found his tooth on the floor! Whew. The tooth fairy came last night and gave him a book called, appropriately, Nice Try, Tooth Fairy. He inscribed it with all of the important information in his first grader handwriting, very cute.

Since this is our first post, I'll throw in a few older photos. Here is Elijah during a flag football game. He LOVED football and still wants to practice, even though the season ended the second week of October. They play wearing helmets, more like bike helmets than football helmets.

And the day before Halloween, kids were invited to come carve the hundred or so pumpkins to decorate the mill in town. Ivy and Amelia both carved some (I helped by scooping guts to get the pumpkins ready). Most of the kids there were Girl Scouts.

Finally, the girls and I participated in the Buddy Walk in early October, which is a walk to raise money for Down Syndrome awareness and research. I work with a baby that has Down Syndrome, and the girls helped me with a playgroup this summer and just loved him. He's got twin sisters that are 2, so mom definitely has her hands full. The weather was hot and sunny, somewhere around 90 degrees, so everyone looks hot and a bit worn out. We got around $100 in pledges, and it always feels good to get the kids involved in helping other people. (Wil, the baby in the carrier, is also the baby on Amelia's shirt.)