Naomi's giraffe

Anyone who has ever traveled with small kids knows what a joy it can be- HA!   I remember one year when we were returning to the states when Naomi was 18 months old, from the time we left our house in Beirut at midnight until we arrived at the Memphis airport, 24 hours past- this is pretty typical.  The a-typical part was that my sweet little toddler slept for a total of 2 HOURS out of that 24- yuck!   Needless to say, as much as I love our visits to the states, the process of arriving is not so fun despite the fact that our girls are mostly good travelers- especially the older two- Naomi kind of remains the wild card.  We're never sure how things are going to go...  I always try to pack a variety of activity choices in their little back-packs- markers, unique coloring books that we pick out and save for traveling, game boys etc.  This year, we were very thankful that our flight left Lebanon at the very normal hour of 9 AM (as opposed to 2 or 3 AM in years past).  Our first let go London (about a 5 hour flight) was non-eventful.  We ate lunch at a really yummy restaurant in the Heathrow airport (no I'm not exaggerating, and yes, it was very expensive- but oh so worth it).  Anyway, it was called something to do with giraffes- I can't remember what the actual name was but it had giraffe in the title.  Each of the kid's drinks came with one of these little plastic giraffes stuck in the straw.  For whatever reason, Naomi was fascinated with the little plastic giraffe.  She played with it throughout the meal.

She played with it throughout the rest of our 3-4 hour layover in London (it's name is Emily by the way). 

She played with it for the first 30 minutes of our LONG 9 hour trans-Atlantic flight.

What, you might ask did you do with your active four year old for the last 8.5 hours of the flight after she played with Emily the giraffe?  Nothing!  Because praise Jesus, hallelujah, she slept the ENTIRE rest of the flight holding Emily tightly in her sweet little grip!  Can someone please tell me where we can buy plastic giraffes in bulk for every time we travel?

Pumpkin carving

I know I have at least 5 other posts that I've promised that I'm way backed up on but I wanted to jump ahead a little to present times or I'll never get caught up!

Have I said yet that I love fall in the US SOOO much!  The weather is gorgeous, the trees are beautiful and there are so many fun things to do.  The girls were so excited about carving their pumpkin.  We bought one of those really cheapy looking pumpkin carving kits from Target.  I was very skeptical but that  thing works!  It made it very easy and the girls (well, Maddie was the only one actively participating by that point) but they were able to carve easily too.

Dad made the hole in the top...

 Maddie was the only one willing to dig her hand in, to pull out the pumpkin goop..

(I feel the need to add here, that although there are no pictures to document it was yours truly who thoroughly cleaned out the pumpkin innards...  Maddie posed for the cute little picture, Abbey read a book somewhere, Jason caught up his fantasy football team and I did the dirty work... but that's my job as mom, right :))

Hard at work carving...

Somehow we managed to not take a picture of the finished product, but here's one of the girls from Halloween night and you can see the jack-o-lantern at their feet.