Halloween 2014

The year of the "Elsa."  

I was actually pretty surprised there was only two Elsa's in Huntley's class.

 

 Of course we can't have Elsa without Anna by her side.

 Unfortunately Anna takes after her father and isn't a big fan of the holiday.  Instead of saying "Trick-or-Treat" like we practiced she just said "No" and then gave back the candy if they put it in her bag. 

 But both princesses were a huge fan of the next morning candy sort and binge they participated in.

A Hunting We Will Go

Last week we had officially lived in Montana for 180 days and that means we are official Montanans.  Lucky for Chris this glorious day fell three days before the opening of rifle season and now every post for the next month will probably revolve around hunting since the man bought a tag for every animal he could.  Except a bear, I drew a line there and he's not very happy with me but I'm not looking forward to venturing into the bear meat territory, ugh! 

 Opening day was last Saturday and our little town was packed with people sporting their orange.  We don't have any stop lights and I've now decided we need them for two days out of the year, fourth of July and the day before rifle season opens.  Since there was so many people, Chris decided he'd wait until this week to actually start hunting.  That lasted until about three in the afternoon when he started getting antsy and decided we'd all go for a ride just to see if we could get lucky.

He didn't get lucky like he was hoping, all the deer were on private land and the elk we saw was huge but too far away and too close to daylight, but the girls got lucky.  We saw our first herd of wild mustangs and Huntley couldn't stop exclaiming how happy she was and how it was the best day of her life.  It was pretty neat and I wish we would have gotten pictures but I think mustangs are more skittish then any other animal I've ever seen in the wild.  We only got to glimpse them for a second and then they were gone.

So even though nothing made it to the freezer this trip we still had a pretty great time and loved being out and about.  Even if Pais's face says otherwise.

Phillips Family Vacation 2014

A year ago my family started a new tradition of trying to do a family trip.  This year everyone was really nice and came to our neck of the woods for our little get together.

We were lucky enough to start our mornings bright and early every day before the sun was up.  I guess when you don't see your cousins very often anymore you've got to maximize all the time you can.

 Our first day we explored the wilds of Yellowstone with hikes around the mineral pools, playing in black sand, watching Old Faithful blow, observing waterfalls, and being disappointed the lodge was closed and not getting to eat ice cream.

 Day two was spent at our little home on the range where the kids got to ride horses and Russell and Huntley had fun catching fish at the pond.

 The best part of the trip was just being with some of the people we love most.

 And I now really want open stairs like this.  Extremely entertaining.

Hair

We've had some strange things going on around here concerning hair.  

Huntley grew a mustache the other night in her sleep.

 I was laughing so hard when I went in to wake her up and saw it.  

Pais didn't want to miss out on the hair fun either and insisted I "curl" her hair the other day.

We all know Pais's hair is a crazy mess of curls and I guess I could have sat their and curled it so it was little ringlets instead of the chaos it normally is but I figured I'd just straighten it instead.

She looked like a totally different kid.  Cute but just not quite the crazy haired little girl I love.  Plus I'm sure someday in the future we won't see much of the curls and only the straight so we have to let the fro happen while it can.

Horse Ownership

 Ever since we bought the horses the main question I've gotten has been "how are you handling it?"  My answer has always been they are the easiest animals we've ever owned.  They don't escape and hang out at the Chinese restaurant across town, they don't sneak in your garden and peck holes in all of your tomatoes, they don't follow you around the entire time you're outside "quacking" and make you want to lose your mind, and so far I haven't ended up in the emergency room as the result of them.  I absolutely love them. 

Until last weekend and I got to experience my first ever pooper scooper duty.  Right before Paisley was born we had 3 dogs and 6 puppies and I remember one day I spent what I thought was forever picking up poop and then sent Chris a really lovely message on facebook about how I was his wife and not the dog poop picker-upper and if he wanted that many dogs he needed to quit fire and take care of them.  Poor guy got a lot of those crazy messages that fire season.  Now that I've had to deal with picking up a week's worth of horse crap I don't think the dogs were that bad.  Horse poop is large and stinky and no matter how many times Paisley exclaimed "we're real cowgirls now!!!" it was not fun. 

Wardrobe Change

One of my favorite things about seasons changing is switching out my girls clothes.  Maybe I'm weird but I love putting away one season and pulling out another and purging all of the stained yucky stuff that for some reason I keep putting back in their drawers and then let them wear to run around town looking homeless.  For at least two weeks every spring and summer my kids actually look taken care of, sort of they do dress themselves which leads to ensembles like this for our daily horse ride.

 I've been wanting to go through clothes since we had our first cold days during the beginning of September but I've made myself wait until now.  The main reason was I didn't want to put Pais's too small stuff into storage if we weren't going to be needing it.  It turns out we don't and on top of going through clothes that were in closets I also got to get rid of three black garbage bags of baby clothes and downsize to one tiny little box full of nothing but camo.  Our future little man is going to be really sneaky.

Homecoming

Huntley celebrated her first homecoming last week.  When she first brought home the note with all of the homecoming activities I kind of thought that it was weird since she's only in kindergarten and isn't homecoming a high school thing.  Apparently in a small town it's an everyone thing and we had quite the busy week.

 Every day she had to dress up as something.  Me and mornings aren't the best of friends so I only took one picture on wild animal day.  She was a "wild" cat because it's all I could come up with the night before.

 Every night there was different things going on with free dinner and I hardly had to cook at all, pretty awesome.  There was even a parade the day of the game.  I couldn't spot Hunt until after she passed so then much to Chris's dismay I made him run up the parade route with me trying to get a picture with no luck.  I guess I've got the next twelve years to try and get better at finding my kid in a crowd.

 Last of all we got to spend the night at the football game.  The girls spent the entire time rolling down the hill and running around with other kids.  Chris and I got to cuddle on the bench and try and keep warm.