Pumpkins, Romance, A Prince, and Beautiful New clothes. All we need is talking mice (or not).

Is he the cutest pumpkin ever, or what?! Halloween was a lot of fun. Gabriel and I came home early that day since I only had one class instead of three. We cleaned the house, played together, and got ready for everyone to come over later that evening. Mark came home and decided that he needed to carve the pumpkin that was sitting on our kitchen table. Normally, I would have been irritated by this, but I was just so excited that I didn't care. Admittedly, when he was using that as an excuse to not go with us, I got a little miffed, but he finished quickly and came with us, so it was okay. Mark isn't fond of Halloween, but that's a completely different story.

So, my dad, Mark's parent's, his sister, Sarah, and Becky, Peter, Chase, Parker and Isaac all arrived between 5:45 and 6:15pm. We made last minute adjustments to costumes, took some pictures, and we were off. Poor Parker has asthma and was wheezing pretty bad about 15 minutes into trick-or-treating, so Mark and Peter took him back to our house for a breathing treatment. He insisted on going back out though once that was done. Our beautiful little pumpkin fell asleep about 3 minutes into it. Literally, we hadn't even gotten past the first house. But, the trick-or-treating part wasn't really for him anyway, so it was more cute than anything.

Last week was the most exhausting week of this quarter, so far. I had to write a mental health policy paper on an act concerning mentally ill offenders (sounds like a good time, doesn't it?). It ended up being 17 pages long, after I cut out some sections. Yeah, it was a beast and not what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to be reading Eclipse, the third book in the Twighlight series, with Mark and playing with my cute three month old. But, Mark didn't think that was the responsible thing to do. Thank goodness for my responsible husband. I finished the paper at 10:30pm Thursday evening after having worked on it all week and all that day (and I do mean ALL). It still wasn't as good as I wanted it to be, but it was done and I didn't care.

On Friday, Mark and I had planned 24 hours away. This included taking Gabriel to Mark's mom's house, going to a hotel, and spending 24 hours alone together. I know, you are all shocked that Mark was able to talk me into doing this so quickly, but I am really glad we did. Things didn't really go as planned. Mark had also had a really crappy week at work, and he didn't get home that night until 8:15pm. He was in an awful mood from what had happened at work that day and was really tired. I had decided that I wasn't going to be upset about it being so late, or even if we didn't go at all (and not because I didn't really want to go). We went back and forth about whether or not we should go, but Mark decided that we should. So, we quickly finished packing and were off. We didn't eat dinner until 10:30pm that night and we didn't get to see a movie as we had planned, but we had a great time. We went shopping the next day, we talked a ton, and we just enjoyed being together. We were both so glad we decided to go and make our relationship a priority.

Don't get me wrong, we both really missed Gabriel. He is an amazing blessing to us, and we are grateful for him every day of our lives. But, as Mark put it, one day all of our kids will be gone and we still want to know each other when it is just the two of us. Gabriel had a great time at Grandma and Grandpa's house (or at least Grandma and Grandpa had a great time with him). I did think it was cute that Mark was the first one to suggest that we should call his mom to make sure everything was going okay. He loves his son :).

I'm posting some of the family pictures that were taken a few weeks ago. I think they turned out really great! As predicted, Gabriel's stent of sleeping through the night did not last long. He did that for about a week or so, and then said, "okay, I'm done with that" and started getting up around 3am again. We're working back up to 7 or more hours at a time, but it is hit or miss at this point. Wish us luck.