No More Bunk

Matthew decided he wanted a regular bed instead of a bunk bed. Fortunately, it was quite easy to convert it to a regular bed frame by taking off the legs and the ladder.  Surprisingly, the room looks nicer and more open now!  And he's quite happy with the decision.  
 

Swamp Walk

We took a little nature walk on Friday. The park is close to our house, but we'd never actually been there before. It was a nice boardwalk, and just the right length since the day was a bit chilly!

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  We stayed here instead of our usual trip to Virginia (stupid pandemic), but we cooked the traditional foods and had a nice time anyhow.  Our friends dropped off some delicious desserts (pumpkin roll, yum!).  And it turned out that they had not taken their ham out to defrost in time, so we were able to return the favor by sharing some of ours!  We had intended to have turkey, too, but the store only had big ones -- they were sold out of the smaller turkey breasts. But that worked out well as we had a delicious dinner even without it.  

 

Poet

 James's poetry was in the middle school publication. He even got a nice certificate to celebrate it!  :)  

New Glen

The covid cases in our area are rising pretty dramatically, so it's likely that we'll be headed into a shutdown of non-essential businesses in the near future. So, we dropped off some of the clothes the kids had outgrown at the Goodwill while they are still open -- and apparently lots of other people had the same idea, because the person there told Mike they had already gotten 180 donations that day!  

On the way home we stopped at a section of Glen Park that we'd never been in before -- it's a little play area across the street from the main park.  The boys liked climbing on the big logs, but James found the grafitti (see picture) a bit disconcerting!

 

Mini Summer

We had a couple of beautiful days with temperatures in the 70s -- rather unexpected but very welcome in November!  And the sunshine was an especially nice antidote to a very stressful few days of watching election results. :)  I took a walk with a friend on a trail near the campus -- I hadn't been there before, but it was beautiful!  Tons of people were out, but it's a big area so it wasn't crowded at all (except the parking lot!) 

 

Pandemic Halloween

Our town recommended that people not do trick or treating this year because of the pandemic. The kids didn't really mind and weren't interested in dressing up just for around the house, so here they are in their "6th grader" costumes!  :)

Halloween morning was cold -- 25 degrees! -- but sunny. James's last outdoor soccer game was rained out last week, so they rescheduled it for this week.  I assumed they might cancel it again due to the cold, but nope, this is Buffalo, so they played it!  He had fun and said the temperature wasn't too bad. (He ended up playing most of the time but had his winter coat for the sidelines.)

In the afternoon we went and did early voting. We had good timing; the line wasn't too long and it moved quickly.  Even though they were doing some social distancing, it felt a little crowded inside, but everyone had their masks on (and we were in Clarence, which has tended to have pretty low rates of covid all along -- although our area has unfortunately started to go up in case numbers again).  It wasn't as joyful to vote as it has been in previous years (never before have we had to worry that a president will try to avoid a peaceful transfer of power), but we are glad to have it done.  

We put up a few decorations and put out a bowl of candy in little individual bags. We don't have many trick or treaters in a normal year, so we didn't expect many this year either. There were at least a few, because the candy disappeared, but we didn't get to see them!  We had a nice family movie night, too.