Some catching up

The time has slipped away from me again and it's been almost a month since my last post! So, Emmitt knows he can walk now (he really started feeling more confident starting on October 11th) but still prefers to hold the hand of Kerry or I...a l l t h e t i m e. I know that sounds cute and that maybe one day I will look back at this period fondly because inevitably he will outgrow wanting to hold my hand all of the time and will in fact not want to hold my hand in most situations but let me tell you something: months of hand-holding gets tiresome! Also, hand-holding isn't entirely accurate either. Emmitt has little hands and we have adult-sized hands so it's really finger-holding; like, pulling-your-finger-out-of-the-socket-finger-holding. Yeah, it starts to hurt (and turn purple) after a while. Needless to say, we are ready for the next stage of him walking on his own. People have told us that we shouldn't wish for that stage because then we will spend our days running after him but I'll have you know that we already spend our days glued to him via finger-death-grip so given the choice between that and running behind him, I'd take the latter.

To get you up to speed on the rest of the month, here's what we've been up to:

• The first started out with a trip up to Leesburg to go to the Waterford Fair (I don't really have any great shots from the fair or I would post them.) We also enjoyed Leesburg while we were there and walked the historic part of town as well as took a trip to the outlets and did some serious damage. Basically, we probably bought all our Christmas gifts for each other early. On Saturday afternoon we had our family photo shoot with Live It Out Photography. The photographer, Amber, and her hubby/assistant, Jon, met us at Lucketts Store (right outside Leesburg) and we really hit it off. They made us super comfortable and we had a fun, laid-back shoot with some great results :) Check out the preview...

• The second weekend in October was the annual Richmond Folk Festival. It was fun but it was tricky trying to fit it in between Emmitt's naps and also, it was super hot this year!

• Last weekend we celebrated Miss Claire's first birthday at her house on Saturday. On Sunday, we went to the Ashland Berry Farm to go to the pumpkin patch with Auntie Krista. Emmitt loved the pumpkins and the tractors that gave us the hayride but we came away without any pumpkins figuring that we would get them a whole lot cheaper elsewhere. I guess we better get on that though since Halloween is only 5 days away! Here are the photos from the pumpkin patch:

Here we are on the hayride (Krista took the picture and I later realized that we didn't get any photos of her at the pumpkin patch! Sorry, Krista!!!) The guy to my right was delivering a carved pumpkin that read "Amber will you marry me?"...he placed it among the other pumpkins for the bride-to-be to find and we got to witness the proposal! It was pretty cool.

Exhibit A: Emmitt squeezing the living daylights out of Kerry's middle finger. He was completely taken with the pumpkins though! He thought they were pretty neato...

Emmitt pointing at the tractor (the double point means he was extra excited)

Emmitt's "give me a break, Mooom!" face.

Hitting the pumpkins was especially fun!

oooh! it has a stem!

Deep in thought over the pumpkin:

Finally, I'm throwing in a picture of Emmitt with his GDaddy from Oct. 14th when my parents came for a visit. Emmitt was dying to sit in my dad's lap so that he could have a go at the computer. Trouble!