continuing on the cooking theme....

Oh look, Camera Face! This is what it looks like with accessories. :PHere, mom, you have some!

Okay, then I guess I'll finish it!

I don't remember what we were cooking, but obviously he enjoyed it. Must have been some kind of cookie dough, I guess. Sadly, this was the last time this spoon was spotted. He started drumming with it and shattered the top (a ceramic pair of apples) on the floor.

soda bread!

We have done quite a bit in the kitchen recently. Jack loves helping! He takes careful notes and then tries to do exactly whatever I did. :) Here we were making soda bread.

Oh, a camera! Better put on Camera Face!

After I cut the dough into two loaves, he had to cut it too.

He actually had figured it out pretty well. He would have cut the loaf in half again if I had let him work on it long enough!

Were you wondering why there was a reindeer helping us cook? Yeah, that was to distract him when he got over-exuberant about helping!

Lest you think it's not possible to cook with a one year old, take a look at these loaves all ready to bake. Ta-daa!

Where have those Bowlings gotten to, anyway?

Well, November was a busy, busy month. Alex has been hard at work, of course, and I wrote two books!

I was hired to write a non-fiction book, which I completed. I also did NaNoWriMo and won! However, that just means I wrote 50,000 words on the project. It still has a ways to go before it is done though -- maybe 75,000 more words for the first draft to be complete!

As soon as November and the books were over, I started madly trying to catch up with everything I had been ignoring for the month. Laundry, vacuuming, dishes, scrubbing everything that I'd been ignoring all month.... We also took a trip down to Tennessee for Alex's grandpa Jack's funeral. (More on that later, in a separate post.) And then it was time to start in on the parade of Christmas cookies and shopping for presents.

Sheesh! It's a wonder I'm here only 2 1/2 weeks into December! Anyway, I have a ton of pictures that I was at least able to take during November, so I will be trying to get them all posted and caught up by January.

For now, it is time to put Jack to bed. But I'll be back!

paper top hat

We are getting a little bit into paper-and-tape crafts these days. One of the things we made was an awesome top hat!

autumn happiness!

While at the park we found that one of the oak trees had dumped leaves just everywhere. And we got to it before the park cleanup people did! Well. We sat right down and figured out the best thing to do with leaves:




The quality is pretty awful (cell phone footage for you) but it was too cute to pass up!

Happy Halloween!

We took Jack trick-or-treating this year. It was fun! Okay, so he's barely 1 year old but he had a great time. He loved the costumes.

Admiring a ring for my princess costume. (Yes, I was wearing jeans. I was a baby-chasing princess. Let's get serious!)

We went to 3rd Street in town because you can go from store to store getting treats and it happens early enough in the day that Jack could participate. Here he is in costume, approaching the trick-or-treat zone. So cute!!

It was rather busy! Luckily that meant there were many costumes to admire.

"Trick or treat!" We told Jack he could also say "Raaar!" because that's easier. This woman was totally charmed!

"Hey, she put something in my pumpkin!"

"Come here, thing. What are you??"

It's candy! Good for putting into the pumpkin and taking back out.

He got the hang of it quickly. I love how he held the pumpkin on his own!

After trick or treating we went to the park to visit with the other dragon!

Here's the official stash:

And the victory lap! (He very much likes to circle around things these days.)

Chewing on the wrong end of a lollypop. (Don't tell him! He likes them that way!)

Dad checking whether the pine cone is still as exciting as before. (Yep!)

Where should we put this awesome temporary tattoo?

It's good to see he's getting started right on the important Halloween tradition of rummaging through all the sweets afterward and confirming the awesomeness of your goodies!

In conclusion: I'm still not sure he gets that he got a pumpkin full of candy. And that's just fine with me! Right now he's treating the candy as "items to be removed from and added to the pumpkin," so we can wait at least until next year before being a candy fiend is necessary. Phew!

NaNoWriMo

The race is on! Every November for four years now, I have signed up to write a 50,000 word novel by November 30th at midnight. It is an exhilarating, crazy, madcap dash to the finish line with over 150,000 other writers. We kicked off at midnight and I'm 1,192 words in. Wish me luck! (And send me motivational goodies!)