Great googly moogly!

It's been 3 months since the last post. I feel like such a failure. Here's my best attempt to catch the highlights and get everybody back up to speed.

School started. Gabriela is going to second grade. Everett and Daniel are doing a home schooling program with Kim that is sponsored by our school district. It basically means they go to school once a week while Kim gets a break and that the rest of the week Kim gets to feel guilty for not being as diligent about teaching them every day. The boys will start kindergarten next year. Daniel is also taking speech classes since he's got a few issues to work on with his pronunciation. He had his first session last week and is doing much better with his "K" sounds, as long as he's lying down. It's a great trick - but now we have to master the standing "K".

Madeline is doing some preschool this year once a week with other families in our ward. She gets to go to someone's house and learn all sorts of fun stuff. She's quite social, so she enjoys it quite a bit. She's also doing much better on her sounds and letter recognition. Madeline's birthday is on Tuesday and she will be all of 4. The plan is that we go bowling. Hopefully that all works out for us. Grandma and Grandpa Borders will be visiting so it should be quite fun.

We had an interesting endeavor for a few weeks in September and October. We joined with a few other families in our community and sponsored Family Friendly Soccer, an endeavor to let our kids get engaged in organized athletics without all the cost, time commitment, and psycho parents that yell at their kids from the sidelines and make everyone else feel embarrassed for them looking like complete idiots as they try to relive their own inadequacies in their own youth through their children. We took about 1.5 hours out of each Saturday for practices and games, and the parents even got to get involved with playing soccer with the kids. Gabriela, Everett, and Daniel enjoyed it quite a bit, although they were happy when it was done. Dad got to coach Gabriela's team, which was a great lesson in patience and was some good exercise to boot. I even heard that comment that I can still run pretty fast for a fat man. I'm like a dwarf in that sense though - great sprinter at short distances, with plenty of rest in between.

Halloween came and went without incident or vomiting. Gabriela was a ladybug, Everett was a dinosaur, Daniel was a pumpkin, and Madeline was a princess. We do trunk-or-treat at the church and it's amazing how much candy you can get in just a half hour. We probably covered about 50-75 cars in that time. I think it's really sad how easy we make trick-or-treating for our kids these days. When I was a kid, it took us about 2-3 hours to get a bag half full of candy. We had to work for that candy, braving dogs and snowdrifts, running into things in the dark, and lots and lots of walking. Our kids sure have it easy. Lucky suckers.

I'm headed out to London on Saturday for work which should be fun. Flying back home on Wednesday to join the family up at Kettle Falls for Thanksgiving. This will be the first trip to Thanksgiving with the vast majority of the Borders family (minus Amy and Neil), so we're trying to figure out how to manage all the people in closed quarters for 4 days straight. The biggest concern is the kids. The Borders' Lodge happens to act much like an echo chamber, which small children tend to just feed off of, if you've never had the privilege to find out. I just hope we're all on speaking terms at the end of the week and that our kids aren't scarred (physically or emotionally) when we drive home. I've already started the threats with my kids. Next will come the bribes. Oh, the joys of parenting.

For those of you waiting for the annual Welling Christmas letter, it's currently under development. We're hoping to make it as good as previous years, but I'm afraid we may have run out of funny as of late, so we'll see if the creative juices will flow. Until then!