At small group this week Mick and Jordan were holding Annie and Levi and simultaneously doing the baby dance to keep them quiet. As funny as it was, they actually did a pretty good job - it looks like it's time for those young men to be getting families of their own.

Last week four men, including Collin, were ordained as deacon at Church of the Good Shepherd, along with two new elders. I am so thankful for the godly leaders God has given us in our church!

Deacons, likewise, are to be men worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons.

In the same way, their wives are to be women worthy of respect, not malicious talkers but temperate and trustworthy in everything.

A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well. Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.

This afternoon Annie attended her first successful classical concert. We don't count the first, which she went to with her daddy, and was so startled at the first loud note that she screamed and had to be hurried out amid dirty looks. Tonight we decided to try again. Our friend Kaitlyn was giving her senior recital on viola, and we really wanted to go. All day long I worked to get Annie sleepy-happy just for the hour of the recital, and it worked. Annie behaved beautifully (excepting one loud, unfortunate grunt between movements!).

This was the most baby-filled recital I've ever been to, from the stage to the back row. The whole back wall and side aisle was full of parents and small people, and at the end of each piece we had to keep rearranging to let in more!

Annie and Levi spent a good bit of the concert staring at each other. It was so obvious that it kept several of us in the back row in silent mirth. I think two and six months are a little young to be getting crushes... don't you?

In case anyone was wondering, Annie is not always grumpy. In fact, in the morning she is often quite happy. For about 10 minutes. Here's my smiling 2-month old!

Saturday afternoon on our way home from Lafayette we drove down to Pine Hills Nature Preserve. Collin has a radio spectrometer on loan for a couple weeks, so he wanted to get some hemlock, Canadian yew, and pine needle samples for his remote sensing research. Pine Hills is very near Shades State Park and Clements Canoes. It's got very steep topography changes (read: very tall, narrow cliffs) and two serpentine creeks. Cool place.

Annie slept most of the hike, which worked well for all of us. I was trying to figure out why I can hike easily up and down cliffs with a 10 lb baby tied onto my belly, and would have been totally unable to do so with a 6 lb baby inside my belly. The best answer I could come up with was that since I can take Annie on and off now, I'm not so tired when I need to hike. I'm not entirely satisfied with that answer.

For the steeper scrambles up the cliffs we had to hand Annie off to each other.

We hiked across a ridge called Turkey's Backbone, sometimes just a few feet wide and dropping sheerly off about 50 feet to either side. Then we climbed down to creek-level, forded the stream, and prepared to hike up to Devil's Backbone.

There's the backbone. It's always hard to get an idea of how steep any cliff is in a photo, but take my word for it, that's a narrow, shear drop off. It had tons of deep carvings in the rock, many chiseled in the late 1800s.

This dove has a speech balloon with the date 1877 and the names Elkannah and Howard.

Annie wasn't too impressed with the scenery, but didn't mind the climb either.

Up at the top of the backbone we found this card, dated Oct 31, 2009 (that day). It was right on the edge of the highest point, and my first thought when I saw it was that it was a little commemorative altar to the place where someone had fallen to his death. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a birthday card, apparently waiting for some dad to find it. When we hiked by the first time, there was just a feather with the card. When we passed by on our way back, someone had added a Snicker bar. Mysterious.

Getting back in Louis, ready to feed Annie and head home.

Driving through the back highways and little towns made for a beautiful way to spend the evening. We passed through a couple small towns and saw some really cute groups of trick-or-treaters. To top it all off, we stopped at our favorite diner, The Monon, in Greencastle. It was our first dinner at a restaurant since Annie was born, and it went really well.

Once we got home, Collin brought out the radio spectrometer (that white/gray box with the tiny old laptop and all the cords coming out of it) and tried it out with his samples. He still has a lot to do with it, and all the needle samples are still sitting in plastic bags in my fridge. Being married to a biologist makes me smile.

My brother Andrew and his long-time friend and roommate Nathan have an annual celebration of the holiday they call Reforween. Nathan's explanation of it goes something like this:

Halloween: A fun little holiday for kids to dress up and get candy.

Reformation Day: A horrible holiday created by people who hate fun, life, happiness, etc.

Reforween: The day when the ghost of Martin Luther rises from the dead and nails the 95 Theses to the heads of unreformed children.

I'm not entirely comfortable with the whole idea of Reforween, since it's pretty much like Halloween without the slutty costumes. Nevertheless, Collin and Annie and I donned our costumes (scarecrow, sunflower, and farmer's wife respectively) and joined in the merrymaking.

It was a fun party. They had good food, good drinks (I'm told, I didn't actually try the homemade hard cider but Collin liked it), a new Slim and Curly movie starring "The Hobo From Hell", and a haunted basement. Mostly, though, there were a lot of good friends, both my friends from Purdue and a large Bloomington conteingent, and we had a great time with many good conversations.

Bonnie, Liz and Sara: Three beautiful European women of different eras.

Drew Howell gets attacked by a viking warrior. Or, wait, that's actually Abram putting his arm around his girlfriend.

Kristen and two of her roommates: Jessica and Bonnie.

Becca as Jackie O, and Allison as the Greek goddess Hera.

Kyla was a pregnant nun. It was kind of disturbing to see her holding hands with Ben, dressed as a priest.

Two Drew Howells!

Andrew was one of the unfortunate Catholic schoolboys who fell afoul of Martin Luther's ghost.

The haunted basement crew. Jordan (middle) is one of Andrew's roommates, and stood at the top of the stairs giving complicated directions on how to navigate the haunted maze. The rest of the kids are neighbors who enjoyed scaring all the party-goers all night.

It was a good party, but more than anything I enjoyed being able to spend time talking to old friends, spending Saturday morning with the girls at Kristen's house, and taking a long walk with Bonnie. Thanks Andrew and Nathan for convincing us to go!

There were many cars parked outside Rose Hill Cemetery last night (All Soul's Day, a.k.a. Samhain, a.k.a Reforween) , and several lights bobbing around through the graves. To avoid the crowds and take advantage of the beautiful cold fall evening, Collin and I opted to wait until tonight to stroll through the graveyard.

Last Saturday Collin and I met our friends Mia and Patrick up in Mooresville to check out Anderson Orchard. I'd heard about it after some of my friends from BloomingMoms took their kids up, and Collin and I love visiting u-pick places. The orchard was huge and fantastic! Not only did they have tons of varieties of apples all available for picking, they had unlimited samples both in baskets up by the store and out in the orchard. And their prices were great - $24 a bushel for firsts or $15 for seconds. And a bushel is a LOT of apples. You could mix any varieties together and they were all the same price.

The four of us split a bushel of apples (firsts and seconds), so we had a lot of apples to cook with! I spent two days last week making applesauce, and then another day making apple cinnamon jelly.


The jelly was a new experiment for me, and I was very happy with the way it turned out. After washing the apples, I peeled them and placed the peels in one pot and the cored apples into the applesauce pot. The peels I boiled and then steeped overnight in the fridge. When I strained off the liquid, it was a thick, opaque rose-pink juice that was very pretty. It turned into clear medium pink jelly by the time it was done, and was a very delicious way to get every bit of flavor out of the apples. Some people even use the cores to make apple cider vinegar, but that was a bit much for me to try this time. For now, we're enjoying the jelly and looking forward to letting Annie try the applesauce this spring!

I needed to run an errand that was only about a couple miles away today, so I tied Annie on and we took the scenic route. We live just across the street from Rose Hill Cemetery, one of the biggest, oldest and most park-like cemeteries in Bloomington. It's especially beautiful in May, when the whole cemetery turns into an enormous peony garden, but it's lovely now too, in the height of the fall color.

Annie is getting to really like being carried in the Moby wrap. This week has been her fussiest so far - on Tuesday and Wednesday she was inconsolable most of the day. Walking around with her tied to me like this was one of the only ways I could get her calmed down enough to sleep.

Well, usually it works.

There's my happy baby! The Moby wrap is basically about 6 yards of very soft t-shirt like knit fabric which you cross around your body three times to create a pouch for your baby. It takes a few minutes to get on, but once you have baby positioned well she's in securely but with still enough stretch in the fabric to let her move comfortably.

This is by far my favorite tombstone in the graveyard. On the front it's a scene of crumbling columns. . .

. . . and on the back, a strong, beautiful city. The inscription below reads: "For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 Cor 5:1" I love the contrast of decay over the dead, earthly bodies with the testimony of faith that God will give us new bodies when we die.

The maple trees are just lovely. A little further down this path I made an amazing discovery. You see, Collin and I have this rather famous neighbor we've been trying to locate since before we moved into our house. Every time we took a walk through the cemetery (which is fairly often) we'd look for Hoagy Carmichael. You know, the pop/jazz composer from the 1930's who wrote Stardust, Georgia on my Mind, the ubiquitous piano duet Heart and Soul, and many others you'd recognize. Anyway, it is a big cemetery but our fruitless search was beginning to get embarrassing. Finally, today, success!

There he is, right off the path and with a fairly large stone. Probably the reason we hadn't found it before was because it's in the opposite corner from our house, and so we don't walk by it too often. Still, you'd think I would've noticed a stone that big. I was so excited I had to call Collin and tell him.

Just thinking about him is getting Heart and Soul stuck in my head right now. I have to stop or it's going to drive me crazy!

Last night Collin spent time with Annie so I could get some work done in the kitchen. When I'd finished, I came in our room and found them studying together like this.