Clara - fall 2009

Clara:

enjoys a tomato with gusto (October 31)
with Baby (October 9)
waking up from her nap (October 10)
with her pumpkin (and Sofi's hand-me-down overalls) (November 4)

backyard picnic (September 2009)

way back in September we had a lovely convention of Franklin family members in our back yard. Two of those pictured have since moved to New Zealand (Judd & Tybe). We can't wait to hear stories of their adventures!

Clara Paints

Clara enjoying painting at the Adventure Playground...

Adventure Playground Adventure

It's a beautiful fall day - perfect for a bike ride to Adventure Playground with Molly's buddy, Chaidan. Molly and Chaidan rode down in their matching trail-a-bikes, and Clara toughed it out in the trailer. Clara got the spotlight in the pictures today due simply to the fact that Zach followed Molly and I followed Clara (we respected the Playground's very reasonable close parental supervision rule). Clara got a huge kick out of the painting (find enough trash, nails, or broken wood and they give you either paint & paint brush or a hammer & nails to do whatever you'd like with). Molly got into the nailing this time.

As I write, Molly & Zach are presumably still there - Clara had to head home for her nap.

Zoo Day

We joined the masses out of school today (Veteran's Day) and had a lovely morning at the Zoo with friends. Here's Molly going in for a kiss on the head, Clara posing for a picture of the hat (by her request) lent to her by Karuna, and an elephant enjoying a tree branch.

Slide Ranch 2009

Last weekend on Halloween Day we took a day trip to Slide Ranch. Clara was thrilled at milking the goat (she still talks about it!) and Molly was really interested in the Bone Grove (the farm has a place where they leave their dead animals for scavengers, and they did a dia de los muertos thing with the kids that day).

Halloween

The Princess and the Bee had a lovely Halloween with the neighbors. Clara was thrilled to be part of the "big kid" crowd and gathered loads of candy *just* *like* *Molly* (and Nate and Oscar). Thanks to Nate's family for sharing the Bee costume. And thanks to Oscar's family for hosting.

We experimented with the "let them eat as much candy as they want for 3 days only) approach to the candy. It seemed to go okay, until about 1:30am when Molly puked all over her bed. We revised the rule to something like "you can eat candy during the day for the next few days, but we're not going to let you gorge on it all at once". Molly seems on board with it. Clara, less so.