A "first" for Brielle, John, & Tim

We rode the 4th Street Elevator in early November.

It's one of the shortest & steepest railroads in the world.

You pull this cord when you're ready to go...

We had this car all to ourselves.

Here is the view from the top:

You can see the Julien Dubuque bridge off to the right side.

Brielle enjoyed the ride back down, and was proud that she sat all by herself :).

"Birthday"

There have been several October & November family birthdays to inspire John... and playtime at Becky's where they pretend to blow out candles. He likes to stack 2 things on top of each other and say "birthday" or "birthday cake"

when Brielle first met her puppy

This shows when she saw her puppy for the very first time :)

Then after a few minutes, I asked her this...

Look how proud & excited she is :)

She has been giving her puppy lots of TLC over the past week: making sure he has a soft place to sleep, covering him with blankets, petting him, telling us all "shhhhh, don't wake him up..."

...and by turning off the lights so he can keep sleeping!

Everyone's been saying we should get one...

one more photo from Halloween

In case you are wondering if John is really strong enough to carry a pumpkin like that... it's an artificial pumpkin :)

When you leave them alone for awhile :)

A couple of weeks ago, Tim brought some seed corn home and filled this plastic pool. When Brielle & John got home, it didn't take them long to discover it! I was getting dinner ready and hearing a LOT of laughter from both of them, so I went into the garage and was surprised to see how much of the garage was covered :). So fun for them!