Holy cow! We are already in the final couple months of the year.

It’s been another busy month, but luckily, not as overwhelming as previous months.

We finally got Little Man’s school photos back and boy are they cute! His class photo was not great, but I imagine it’s difficult to get eleven 3 year olds to cooperate.

We started October with staff duty, followed by a long weekend. We didn’t do too much over Labor Day, but we took a short drive to Talon Falls Adventure Park in Melber, Kentucky.

It was a beautiful day and not very crowded. Little Man had a blast and we were able to take our time and let him lead the way.

The rest of the long weekend, the boys did yard work and of course, we did the Home Depot workshop.

We capped off the long weekend with a visit to the ENT. The doctor said he didn’t think Little Man’s tongue tie was causing issues with speech as its placement was fine. His speech therapist thinks we might need a second opinion just to be sure, but is now looking at other options for him, such as an AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) tablet. I’m very hesitant to agree to him using that as I don’t want him to rely on a device to speak when he is doing so much better.

Ms. Alexis also thinks we may need some speech apraxia testing, which has me terrified since it’s something that will not be able to be “cured.” Speech apraxia is basically, as I understand it, the brain’s inability to create the movement of mouth/tongue muscles needed to form words correctly.  It’s fairly rare as only 1-2 children out of 1000 are diagnosed. Needless to say, I’m not ready for that possible diagnosis.

The next week brought our Lowes workshop and a bunch of cleaning for our company to come.

The 3rd week brought a visit from the in-laws. The Mister even took off almost a week so he could spend more time with them. We packed the visit with shopping, family photos, and pumpkin patch fun.

It was such a nice visit. We hope it won’t be so long until the next one.

The Mister has had some excitement over the last month. He finally dropped his retirement packet! It still needs to be approved, but it’s in and that (sort of) gives us a timeline for when his military career will be over. Can hardly believe it’s so close to happening.

He also received his Associates Degree diploma in the mail. He’s feeling all sorts of official now. The light is at the end of the tunnel now. Civilian life is speeding towards us.

After all of the excitement with a visit from the grandparents and big life changes, Little Man had a pumpkin picking day at preschool. They had time to play in the gym, painted pumpkins, played in shaving cream, fed animals at the petting, and got to bring home their very own pumpkin.

Little Man brought home a pumpkin, but as it turns out, it wasn’t the one he picked out originally (mama didn’t realize they had names written on the bottom and Little Man said he picked that one, so we ended up bringing a classmate’s pumpkin home). This gave us a great opportunity to talk about not taking things that aren’t ours — and it made mama double check everything before leaving. Little Man brought the pumpkin back to school and told his classmate he was sorry for the mistake. All got squared away.

The last weekend in October brought one of my favorite weekend festivals – El Dia de Los Muertos at Cheekwood.

The boys were struggling to sit still, so they went to see the train sets instead.

The weather was entirely too hot for the end of October, so we called it an early day.

We wrapped up the month with Little Man’s  Halloween Costume Parade at school and some alternative trick or treating for the first time at APSU’s G.H.O.S.T. event — which turned out to be great because the weather did a 180 with rain and a freeze warning for Halloween.

G.H.O.S.T. at Austin Peay State University was the perfect way for Little Man to trick or treat safely, without having to go door to door.  It’s put on by the various student activity groups/teams/Greek life as well as members of the community on campus. They have different tables/booths all around the main quad with food trucks and kid friendly activities.

We carved our pumpkins the night before Halloween. Little Man actually seemed to enjoy helping this year.

Halloween saw a party and the costume parade at preschool, which both the Mister and I were able to attend.

We took a few photos on our porch like we usually do before the cold chased us back inside.

As a final bit of news for the month, my baby sister got engaged! She celebrated her birthday on the 30th and Bryan proposed on Halloween. We’re so happy/excited for her!

Next month is already November. Yikes!

I don’t have anything major planned (for real this time!). We have a handful of workshops and the Mister is going back to Texas for a week for disc golf with some of the soldiers in the SRU.

Then it’s Thanksgiving and before we know it, it’ll be Christmas. This time of year always flies by.

Until then,