Weekly recap- Georgie.

Mama started training for another half marathon in January. So now every Monday, I get dragged along (or rather pushed) as mama runs with some of her friends. Most days, I just bury my face in blankie and go back to sleep. (Today was our first real test of "cold" weather. It was about 45 degrees when mama pushed June and I to school. We did not like it. Mama loved it.)

I love our little playhouse!

Mama has been hitting up every church hot dog dinner lately. This one had a fishing game where you caught teddy bears! June LOVES her new pinkie.

It was too warm for my costume, so June decided I could be a princess. I brought down the house.

Though I refused to wear my crown for very long.

This year Henry is a train engineer. Double bonus for Henry- he loves trains and he gets to wear normal clothes. This guy is too smart for his own good.

After all of these church festivals, we've amassed quite the trinket collection. June lays them out and pretends it's a birthday party for mama. Then everyone takes turns picking out treats for their buckets. And June talks your ear off about going to see "Goodnight Moon" and "The Runaway Bunny" with her class on campus.

We've all been sharing a hacking cough. One night I was so miserable, I climbed in my bed with some toys and played by myself for almost 40 minutes. (That's really quite a feat for me. Generally I can't last 2 minutes without demanding to be held.)

While I played, Henry set up a fair. "Get tikets here."

The admission price was 1 ticket. And you won't be surprised there was also a "Closed" sign.

Finally, Henry wrote out the rules:

"1. You need one tiket.

2. One persun at a time

3. Do not take the whole buket."

This is easily the most imaginative thing Henry has ever done.

June also pulled out some hidden talents. She's been practicing drawing faces and moved on to the rest of her body.

This is Junie as a ballerina. She's very careful to point out that the line on top is her hair.

And here's a video we forgot to post from vacation. While June spend most of her time taking things away from me and pushing me over, periodically she likes to make me laugh. Mama says this works because there's a closed door between us. Normally, she would have taken my nuk and thrown it somewhere, making me cry.

Oktoberfest from John.

Our buddy John put up a comprehensive post about our trip to Oktoberfest. We thought you might enjoy it. Check it out.

HollyWILD!- Henry.

Mama announced we were going to see wild animals, so we put on our old clothes.

Don't ask us how, but papa somehow still manages to confuse June and Jo's clothes. Last Christmas, he got June into a 3-6 month dress and shirt. This time, she's in Jo's overalls. The this was she liked them so much, we just left them on.

But now baby Gollum is doesn't have anything to wear!

Overalls all around. You'll remember this from the rest of these kids and our cousin John as a baby (just about 25 years ago). Georgie is the first kid that is long enough and not too wide to wear these bibs well.

Finally, Hollywild. It's a private animal park that offers a petting zoo, a drive through safari and a few more wild animals, many of which have been retired from movies, commercials and other Hollywood endeavors (yes, we saw Lil' Wayne's white tiger).

Since we had a groupon for admission, mama was a little lax with her money. We got a big bag of animal feed, a sleeve of crackers, and come bottles of unsweetened kool-aid to feed the animals.

Junie's found plenty of hungry goats.

Mama will have to download all of the pictures I took with my camera to post later.

We loaded on old school buses with no windows and one big bench to head out to the safari. Don't worry, we didn't feed JoJo to any buffalo.

Did you know a buffalo can swallow a whole bagel in one gulp?

This is what it was like.

Check out that tongue. To be honest, we didn't think we'd be at Hollywild long, but we stayed for almost 5 hours. They had an animal show and a fairly big zoo and we rode the safari bus twice.

There was only one low point- when I got bit by a zedonk (half zebra/half donkey). It left a big chomp mark but I felt better after an ice cream sandwich from the gift shop.

Anything exotic up there, June?

Before we left, we got another shot.

And all of the kids looked in the same direction and smiled! A Turner first! You can see just how pleased Jo is that she's up on the hippo with the big kids.

Oans, zwoa, drei – g'suffa!- Georgie.

I've recently been promoted to the couch. You how no idea how pleased I am to be up with the big kids. Mama and Papa like it because it's the only way to keep me still(ish).

Mama was impressed that Henry drew this for school. It says "I want to be a train engineer."

We piled in the car and fought through game day traffic to go to Walhalla (holla!) for Oktoberfest. I was the only one who would dance with mama.

The highlight for Christopher was the cookie decorating table.

John and Henry got to ride some rides!

And make cookies! We all also made Christmas ornaments from pop bottle caps glued on tennis balls.

And we closely inspected the workings of this tilt-o-whirl. Mama declared it not so sound and was surprised none of us were impaled by flying parts.

Papa up north- Georgie.

Don't think that while we were at the beach, papa was slaving away non-stop having no fun.

On the contrary, he was at a conference at Notre Dame and got to see a bunch of his friends from Wisconsin, and even posed for a picture with touchdown Jesus.

Then he flew down to Columbus (that's right, he flew from South Bend to Columbus- via Cleveland), for PawPaw's retirement dinner. That's a good looking family. And you may have noticed that papa came back missing about 4 pounds of hair. It seems like he took a little off at every stop of his trip.

I'm on a boat- June.

It's our favorite time of year. Fall in the south is always filled with corn mazes and festivals. So get ready for some fun updates.

Henry celebrated an early Halloween gift bag from school (we have NO idea who or why) and played with all of the trinkets in his new hiding spot.

On Tuesday, we headed out to Denver downs for their awesome fall extravaganza. We took a hayride to the pumpkin patch and each picked out our own pumpkin. But when we got back, it started to rain. So we snapped a quick picture. (At least Jo looks happy.)

Then we headed into the barn to play in the corn boxes and on the huge hay pile. I got up the nerve to swing on a rope off the top of the hay once. But that's once more than Henry.

You'll notice corn maze behind us. We've had another dry summer. (It's officially a drought now.) We didn't get enough rain until LABOR DAY to get the corn in. And then it's only rained a few times since. So the corn was only about 12 inches high. But they did put in the effort to plant a fitting tribute to the Civil War Sesquicentennial. So mama rounded up some umbrellas and they ran the maze.

You don't just run through this maze either. There are 12 markers you have to find with the help of your map. Now you understand why it appeals so much to mama and Henry. and on each marker there was a Civil War question. Remember how mama spent Monday teaching us about slavery and Sherman burning the south? Well, on Tuesday, she broke it to Henry that President Lincoln was assassinated. If you know, Grams Cracker, you can imagine how much we think of President Lincoln in this house. So Henry was devastated. So devastated that they continued on to seek the remaining markers out of order, then called it quits before they reached the last 3.

One more quick story. Because the corn was so low, Henry abandoned the soggy map and just ran from marker to marker through the maze. When he and mama decided to abandon the maze, he said, "Well, we got 9 of the 12 markers. We're just missing numbers 4, 11, and 12." Mama consulted the map, and sure enough, those were the ones we missed. That kid knows his numbers.

It rained for almost 24 hours and the temperatures dropped, so we got into our warm clothes (for a day). You can't really tall, but George is almost too tall for this outfit. I never got to tall for this one, just too chunky. This just hangs on Georgie.

Georgie is very clingy right now and doesn't really want to play on her own- EVER. But mama found out that she does love to sit inside things. So we're often climbing in and out of the baby bed. What's that back there in the laundry basket?

Surprise!

First in succession- Henry.

We were sad to have to leave the beach, but John and I were big help taking luggage down the elevator to the cars.

Is this one ready to go down, mom?

Mama had the idea of getting a picture of all the kids. This was as good as it got.

We stopped in Columbia to eat lunch at Mister Tony and Miss Juliet's favorite restaurant ever- Qdoba! It was still early in the afternoon so mama decided we all needed a little culture in our life.

And culture is what we got. She took us to the South Carolina Capitol House.

June liked the House of Representatives chamber. I liked that you voted by pushing a button that said "Yea" or "Nay." Mama liked that all of the walls were covered in padded wallpaper that either had the state seal or a very fancy "SC" insignia.

The best part of the whole state house was the escalator. It took me a minute to get the guts up to go down. But I was the only who who actually got the guts. Mama is timid enough around escalators and she couldn't work up the nerve to pull June on while she was holding Jo.

The grounds were covered in so many monuments, we didn't even get to half of them. Luckily, I had a map to show us all of them. This guy on the horse is Civil War General Wade Hampton. He was at Gettysburg.

Mama thought this Palmetto State Statue was hysterical. That's a fake tree back there.

Here's the memorial to the Confederate woman. That's right, she's being crowned by an angel while being flanked by two adoring cherubs. As we walked around the grounds, mama got more and more worked up. This state LOVES the fact that they were the first state to secede from the Union. You may remember that South Carolina came under some scrutiny a few years back for still flying the Confederate flag on the state house. You'll be glad to know that they no long fly the flag on the building. Instead, it holds a prominent place in front of the state house.

Mama's blood was boiling when we got to the African American History monument. And all it told us about history is that Africans sailed from different places to Charleston on a boat. Mama then took the time to explain to us that those Africans didn't want to come to America and that the boat ride wasn't that fun. (At that point a college kid walked by and told mama she was awesome for teaching us history. That calmed mama down a little bit.)

I was especially concerned when I read that the original wooden state house was burned down by Sherman's army. I asked incredulously "You mean Gram's and PawPaw's army burned down the Capitol?" Mama then gave me an earful about how Gram's and PawPaw's army is also our army.

All of that information was a LOT to take in. We hit the bus stop and headed back home.