The Strong Family: October Overview 1/3

I keep accidentally taking a month off of blogging... oops. I guess it's a little harder to get back into it regularly than I thought it was. That's ok. I'm okay with blogging when I want to.

Anyway, we went to Gardner Village with my neighbor friend, Nichole, and some of her sisters-in-law and their kids. They have a scavenger hunt where you find all the witches hiding all over the place doing stuff (like playing the piano, fighting a fire, etc) and if you find all the right ones and fill it out on a form, you can take those to the bakery there and get cookies for like 50 cents. So we did! It was lovely.

Here's Kailyn and Harlie Jo with Spencer and Brigham and some of their cousins.

And I also celebrated my 28th birthday! It was so great.

I got flowers, which only just barely died. They were lovely.

I also got to go shopping! Alone! And then Garrett surprised me by showing up at the store with me without the kids because he had secretly dropped them off with his parents. I got some tribal leggings, a flowy polyester super flattering shirt, some camo slip-ons, a curling wand, some free mascara and free sweet tooth fairy treats, some concealer, and Garrett got me a head massager thing (which is absolutely heavenly) and we went to Cafe Rio (because that's just my favorite restaurant to eat at whenever I get a choice) WITHOUT KIDS! It was super fun.

Then, since my birthday was on a Wednesday, he took me out dancing that weekend with our friends, the Hickmans. Here's Vanessa and me right before heading in (and taking off our uncomfortable high heels...).

We had a blast. The boys danced with us for like 1-2 dances and just joked and stuff the rest of the time. And then we went to IHOP afterwards. It was way fun! I'm super glad we had another couple with us because honestly, dancing would not have been very fun just the two of us... :)

We also had a ward Halloween party, on the 10th.

Here's Harlie Jo as Rapunzel (which was Kailyn's costume last year).

Here's Kailyn as Anna (from Frozen. )

And here they are with Mia, our neighbor friend, dressed up as Elsa from Frozen. She came with us to the party.

And here's like my favorite picture ever. I dressed my sweet little River up as a girl this year. I got so many comments all night. People couldn't remember that I'd had another little daughter and I'd have to tell them "This is actually my son... I'm being a mean mom tonight..." Isn't he darling? It was super weird seeing him as a girl because he looks a lot like Harlie Jo as a baby. Such a stinking cutie. He'll probably kill me when he grows up... :)

"Being a girl isn't so bad!"

The other fun thing is that Garrett's mom dressed Garrett up as a girl for his first Halloween too and that's where I got the idea! And he turned out totally fine, so...

River also turned 8 months.

I haven't made his monthly announcements for like the last 3 months, but here are some of his developmental milestones from then: He started doing a super cute inchworm crawl right before he turned 8 months. He also got his first tooth a couple days before this. He's quite the little vacuum and he sleeps awesome at night, waking up like once a night, and sometimes not at all. He's a sweetface.