Flashback: Leslie comes to town

We'll probably be mixing in some older pictures in with the next few posts to get caught up. Leslie (Wendy's sister) visited us in the beginning of October for about a week, and brought her son Conner here, and we had a great visit! It was so much fun to have her here with us (and hopefully we didn't scare her away from coming back!).

Carter and Conner are pretty close in age, but Carter always wanted to grab Conner's head, so they didn't always get along super well. In fact, much of the time they were together, it looked something like this:


With poor little Conner crying because of big mean Carter, but I'm sure that will change as time goes on.

One of the neatest things is that a girl in our ward, Anna, was taught the gospel by Leslie when she was on her mission in Poland, and so they were able to get together and catch up. She has a son, Ryan, who was born just a few days after Conner, so it was fun for them to let the kids play together.

The three of them were partners in crime - it's probably good they're not always together :)


They also went with us on our visit to the pumpkin patch, and had a lot of fun!


Some other highlights from the pumpkin patch were:

Wesley learning to balance pumpkins on his head (I'll leave it up to your imagination what happened to this pumpkin seconds after this picture was taken - HINT: also the name of a one-hit wonder band from the 90's):


Cameron getting some pretty serious air on the blow-up slide:


Carter found a fun place to play peek-a-boo from:

Wesley had fun in the giant hay maze:


Then it was off to our town's firestation presentation...


There were demonstrations from all of the city's different service branches:

The guys from the SWAT team let the kids dress up and play with their gear. Wesley got decked out in a full flak-jacket, bulletproof helmet, and MP5 - he's now ready to go to Iraq and settle things down:

They had a team and dogs from search and rescue:


The boys had a great time putting out a fake fire on a dog house with a miniature fire hose:



My personal favorite demonstration was the jaws of life - where they started with a perfecly good junker car, and then just destroyed it:

First the windows were taken out:


Then the doors:


Then the entire top was removed:


Until the final product (Now it's a convertible!):


The entire process took just a few minutes. It was really amazing to me - and to think all this fun and destruction is done in the name of saving lives - can you say career change???

This was all topped off by rides on the giant fire ladder and a police bike, and all the free hot dogs and popcorn you could eat. All around, it was a really great event, and loads of fun for all.