What a great, great night I had last Saturday night, when Jeff & our family surprised me – to put it mildly – with a party at our church.  Wow.  Just wow.  I’m not sure I can remember another time I have been so surprised, as a matter of fact!  It was just a great, great time seeing so many family & friends who came to share the evening with me.  Mallory was in charge of the camera while I was walking around visiting with everyone.  She got lots of good pictures of my blue shirt, that’s for sure :-).  You can’t really tell here, but that’s me hugging my dear friend Pam Cato, with Charlotte’s husband Bob looking on.  That’s Boo to the left of the picture, and to the right are my cousin Susan and her son Ross talking to Sherri.

Here’s kind of an artistic view of me talking to Lee’s mom & dad, Roger & Bennie, with Lee in the shot, too.  🙂

I can’t say this was my favorite part of the evening – there were way, WAY too many special things going on for me to narrow it down to one, or two dozen, but the cake was, in fact, pretty spectacular.  What a night.

It was fun that Halloween was on Friday this year, when Mason comes to the house, so I got to spend that day with him while he was all excited :-).  We had some errands to run that morning, but did stop at Krispy Kreme to get Halloween doughnuts to celebrate, and then for lunch back at the house we made orange milk for him to drink :-).  Then when June got here after school we made eyeball specimen jars – here is Mason giving his gak a final good squeezing.  It was no surprise to anyone that he chose to make his blue. 🙂

That evening I stopped & picked up Meg & Little Hope, and we met Addie & Lee, and Lindee & Jackson, and all the kids at the church to go trick or treating.   Here is Batman Mason showing off his Baterang :-).

Thursday evening we headed to the school district auditorium to see Mallory sing, along with all of the other fourth & fifth grade choruses in the district.  She had been talking about this day since school started.  They choruses at all of the elementary schools had been working on the same songs since school started.  Then Thursday they spent the whole day at the auditorium, working with the high school and middle school directors, and the high school chorus, combining all of the choirs, and working on the performance.  We went to hear them sing that evening.  They sang maybe eight songs, and it really was very impressive.  Here is a tired but very proud – and rightfully so – Mallory afterwards, showing off her T-shirt.