Spoon+Cate visit+ Grandpa Dowiak visit

Here Autumn is learning to eat with a spoon. She's a little messy, but it's fun to watch. I think she's starting to get the hang of it...
After a couple of minutes with the spoon Autumn thought of another technique to get her yogurt...
Aunt Cate came in for a weekend visit to catch up with the growing Autumn. We had a wonderful time. We were able to sneak out Friday night for a girls night out. Saturday we saw the Bodies exhibit and made our way to the South Side later that night. Autumn got some awesome books that she hasn't been able to put down...here they are...
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving break with Grandpa Dowiak and Lucus. Here is Grandpa Dowiak putting together the machine to watch some old home videos. I got to see him getting ready for his high school prom, very fun...(a personal opinion but I think Matt and Miles look similar to a younger Grandpa)...As always we had a nice visit with Lucus and look forward to seeing him soon.
Here she is...all smiles!!
Just a quick update...Miles is not going to Japan this week, we get to keep him around here, very exciting!! Poor Autumn has the sniffles. She's upstairs taking a nap, hopefully a long one, right now. My semester is almost over, I have one more class Tuesday and then I'm done. Classes start again the first week of January. The weather here has been pretty mild so far this year, but we're getting ready to bunker down for the holidays!! Hope everyone out there is staying warm!

Nose

North Carolina Weekend

We just got back from an overdue visit to the Wilson's from North Carolina. As always we had an enjoyable time. It was nice just to be able to sit back and relax for a weekend away from home. We were also able to check out Chris' land where he's building himself a cute house, we loved it! We also checked out the local pottery scene. There wasn't anyone throwing pots, but it was still fun to walk around. There was also a local children's museum/park which was really pretty cool. It had farm animals, reptiles, two lions, monkeys, and smaller animals outside...and inside there were dinosaur bones, a play area, and small discovery areas. We saw a two-headed turtle, and as always I didn't have my camera...but it was really cool. The really freaky part was that the lions were fed by food on wagons, so when we walked by with Autumn in the stroller they acted like they were hunting her...now that's something that would spook any parent (speaking of spooking...I'll try to post Halloween pictures later, Nellie took them b/c I didn't grab my camera...do you notice a theme in my life?) Here are cute pictures of Autumn in her new winter hat, I love it!!

Chris+Jodie, and Greg...I took some pictures just before we left in the morning. It was fun to spend some time together catching up...
We stopped at the New River Gorge in West Virgina on the way back. It's the second largest arched bridge in the Western hemisphere built in the 1970s...a little trivia, one man died while building it. The first picture is the old bridge in the Gorge, and the second picture is the larger one. It's a little scary driving over it...hope this one is inspected.